Facebook privacy settings

December 11, 2009 in Internet | 6 comments

THIS IS OUTDATED, CHECK THE 09/2010 STATUS HERE

facebook-settingsmenuFacebook introduced some new privacy tools mid-December. Some of these changes are not positive only.

Also many users have no idea about what parts of their profile they share to their friends, the world or friends of friends.

We decided to write some instructions for you to go through to protect your privacy and keep on using Facebook, in the safe way.

CREATE FRIEND LISTS

First, let’s create create lists of your friends, for example ‘School friends’, ‘Work mates’ and so on to ease the privacy management. Go to ‘Friends‘ view to create and edit lists. You can add each of your friend to multiple lists.

From privacy point of view, you want to create at least ‘Limited Profile‘ list and add the friends from who you want to limit access to your profile.

PROTECTING YOUR INFORMATION FROM APPLICATIONS YOUR FRIENDS USE

By default the Facebook applications (=games, quizzes, …) your friends use can see A LOT of information about you. This information can be used even to distribute viruses and malware. You should (yes, you really should!) limit the applications’ access to your profile. Go to Settings -  > Privacy Settings -> Applications and Websites -> What your friends can share about  you -> Edit Settings (link) to select what to share.

Block applications

PROTECTING YOUR FRIENDS FROM THE WORLD

Friends are now, according to Facebook, “public information” and not controlled by any privacy option! This means that not only your friends, but anyone landing on your site, no matter if they’re registered to Facebook or not, can see who’s your friend.

facebook-friendsThere is still one way to hide the friend list from the rest of the world: select the pen icon besides Friends box on your profile page, and uncheck “Show my friends on my profile“.

It’s not any more possible to hide the list of your friends from specific friends, so in practice you need to remove such friends you don’t want to let have access to that information.

HIDE YOUR PROFILE FROM GOOGLE & OTHER SEARCH ENGINES

Uncheck “Allow Indexing” under Settings -> Privacy Settings -> Search. Your profile can still be found inside Facebook, but the Facebook profile page will not be the first thing Google lists about you. Here you also can decide if Facebook search finds your profile.

PROTECTING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION & SUBMITTED CONTENT

facebook-contactsfacebook-profileAfter creating the required friend   lists, go to Settings -  > Privacy   Settings  -> Profile information (URL). Here you can select who sees the posts and comments on your wall and details of your personal profile and so on. To enable the settings,   click ‘Change settings’ on top and type in your password.

For example, click on the button on the ‘Religious and Political Views‘ row. Then click ‘Custom‘. Now in the   dialog that pops open select ‘Only Friends‘ in the ‘Make this visible to‘ -field. Add the ‘Limited Profile‘ list under ‘Hide this from‘. Back on the privacy page it will now read “Only Friends;   Except: Limited   Profile”.

See Settings -> Privacy settings   -> Contact information (URL) to adjust what parts of your contact  information you want to show to your friends & the world.

A very handy tool to check what parts of you profile page are shown to a friend of you is Settings -> Privacy Settings -> Contact Information -> Preview My Profile. Now you can type in the name of a friend to see your profile with his eyes.

WHO SEES YOUR SUBMITTED CONTENT

facebook-lockEach status message, link, photo and video you post now has a selection on how public it will be (the small lock icon). Here also you might want to make sure that ‘Friends only’ is the default setting and maybe hide the  posts from ‘Limited profile’ list.

Also each Photo Album has its own privacy settings. You might want to check that  you  share the photos to ‘Friends only’.

Also do remember that these will be  available for EVERYONE, and there’s nothing you can do about it: Name,  Profile Picture, Gender, Current City, Networks, Friends, or Pages – so  make it’s something you are OK to publish. (Source)

APPLICATION PRIVACY SETTINGS

For each application you’ve installed (including Events, Notes, Groups..), you can decide what they’re allowed to do. The settings are not easy to understand, but still, do go to Application settings.

PROFESSIONAL VIEW / SECOND OPINION

Paul Fenwick, a Facebook security specialist has written an extensive analysis about the new privacy tools. Check his blog post for more information and also join his security study group. Here are some of his recommendations:

Go to your profile page. Scroll down until you see Recent Activity. Anything you don’t want to see there, delete it now. Any time you join a group, or like an event, or fan a page, or change your relationship status, or sneeze, go back to Recent Activity and check if you’re happy with that being broadcasted.

Go through all the new privacy settings, and think about each one. Some of them may not have even been mentioned in the migration tool. My date of birth had unexpectedly went from being completely private to completely public.

REFERENCES

Facebook blog explains the new privacy tools

AUTHORS

Risto H. Kurppa
Timo Jyrinki

To contribute, check Etherpad.

LICENCE

Creative Commons 2.0 BY-SA

Feel free to forward & share!

THIS IS OUTDATED, CHECK THE 09/2010 STATUS HERE

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  2. Craig’s avatar

    Craig on December 14, 2009 at 9:26 pm

    Some people might find it more valuable to approach security as Opt-in rather than Opt-out. So rather than creating a group that has limited access to your profile, set your profile security up as limited access by default, then create a group called “close friends” (or whatever) and give that group access the broader access (of seeing your wall, photo’s, etc)

    I think the riskiest security option is “friends of friends”… it’s a pretty broad net and not very selective at that…

  3. Risto H. Kurppa’s avatar

    Risto H. Kurppa on December 14, 2009 at 9:48 pm

    Hi Craig, thanks for your comments! That’s true, creating a close friends to give access to might be a good concept too, didn’t think about it. To me the opt-out -approach for some reason appeared first, I think Facebook supports it better but not sure.

    And yes I also agree that friends of friends.. it’s just too many people..
    If I have 300 friends, they each have 200 people that don’t overlap with others, that’s already 60000 people.. Huge number already, and for sure includes people you don’t want to allow access to your data..

  4. Craig’s avatar

    Craig on December 15, 2009 at 8:08 am

    The benefit of opt-in (the close friend list has more access) is if you forget to add them to the group… well they have limited access until you give them more (which might not make you popular, but it’s more secure). With Opt-out, it’s easier to forget to add people to exclude. (but if excluding is the rarity, then it’s less work)

    I guess it’s just which-ever you consider the exception…

    of course you could just avoid putting anything up that, while you’d prefer not to be seen by everyone, wouldn’t be the end of the world if they did see it… :-)

  5. Craig’s avatar

    Craig on December 15, 2009 at 8:10 am

    (btw… thanks for the guide… very informative :-) )

  6. Risto H. Kurppa’s avatar

    Risto H. Kurppa on December 15, 2009 at 8:18 am

    You’re right, opt-in has benefits.

    Nice if I’ve been able to write something useful :)