Trumblog

As I pointed out yesterday, if you are concerned enough about the privacy of your data on Facebook to consider deleting  your account then you should make sure that your data is restricted now rather than risk it being open to the public until Quit Facebook Day on May 31.  Therefore here are some tips for checking the privacy settings of your account and the accounts of your friends and family.

Review Your Privacy Settings

Yesterday I mentioned the video from The Huffington Post that describes how to fix your privacy settings.  For those who would prefer a check list here you go

1. Account > Privacy Settings > Personal Information and Posts > Posts By Me – the default setting is “Everyone” you should probably change this to “Only Friends”
2. Account > Privacy Settings > Personal Information and Posts > Photo Albums – here you will have to tweak the privacy settings of each photo album individually
3. Account > Privacy Settings > Friends, Tags and Connections > Photos and Videos of Me – you’ll want to lock this down as well so that friends with lower standards of privacy don’t sabotage your privacy when they tag you
4. Account > Privacy Settings > Contact Information – here you need to tweak how contact information like your phone number, home address, email address, IM screen name and website is shared.  There are even if options for adding you as a friend or sending you a message is visible to certain people.
5. Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites > What You Share – at the bottom of this page is a link to a list of applications that you have allowed to access your profile, they will abide by the settings that you managed previously, but if you see applications listed that you never use or used only once consider deleting them.
6. Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites > What your friends can share about you – this is another place where you can ensure that your friends don’t inadvertently divulge your private information
7. Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites > Instant Personalization Pilot Program – this program shares your information with with partner sites for personalization on them and sharing information with your friends.  Don’t like that?  Uncheck the box and opt out.
8. Account > Account Settings > Facebook Ads – change “Allow ads on platform pages to show my information to” from “only my friends” to “no one.”

Scan Your Privacy Settings

Now that you’ve tweaked your privacy settings it’s time to check your work.  ReclaimPrivacy.org has a great little bookmark that will scan your profile to see how secure your profile is with things like Instant Personalization, how your personal information, contact information, information on your friends, tags and connections can be shared and if friends or applications can share your personal information.  The bookmark gives you a score and you can fix some of these issues with the click of a button.

See What Facebook Information Is Public

Finally you should dig in an see exactly what of your information on Facebook is being shared with everyone.  Here are a few tools to do that. The Facebook API browser displays exactly what personal information on Facebook is publicly available through their API.  Just paste the ID or alias of any Facebook account and this website will comb through your the Facebook API and display what is there.  For example the information publicly available from my profile is limited to education and work history, about the same as is on LinkedIn, and is exactly how I intend it to be.  But if you haven’t tweaked your privacy settings you may find embarrassing and personal things being completely public.

Bridging these two options is Profile Watch that scans your profile, gives you a rating for privacy AND shows you what of your personal information is public in a slightly more user friendly interface.  Frankly I think that this rating is not that useful when compared with the Reclaim Privacy bookmark that shows what categories of data are private or not, but the display of the data itself is much nicer than in the Facebook API browser and is a good double check.

While I hope that Facebook will address this privacy issue and make understanding what information is public or private and modifying those settings easier, I suspect that it’s going to be some time before they do.  Until that time, or May 31, I suggest that you check your privacy settings for yourself and address any privacy issues that you have.

Do you have other suggestions for privacy settings that should be reviewed or tools to check your work?  Let me know in the comments.

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

 Loading ...