Facebook Privacy PSA
I’ve noticed a lot of friends and family on Facebook seem to take an all or nothing approach to sharing some of their more personal information. Some people, even the most casual friends, have their address, telephone number, birthday, visible while others that I’m close to provide none of this information. And it occurs to me that maybe both groups of people are unaware of the amount of control Facebook provides in determining who can and can not see this information. Facebook doesn’t exactly make this obvious, so I thought I might share some of my ideas on Facebook privacy settings.
The first step is to organize your friends into several groups based on how well you know them. To do this open the friends tab.
Next click the “Make a New List” button which will let you give the list a name and then add your friends to it. You can see that I’ve made a few lists. My “Casual Friends” are acquaintances that I may have met but don’t know very well, or perhaps online friends. Basically friends that I’m not sure I want to share every single personal detail with. All nice people I’m sure, but still. Next I have a list called “Do I Know You?”. Sometimes I get friend requests from people that I think I may know but I’m not certain. Also, there are friends that I only know from certain Facebook games like Mob Wars. “Do I Know You” is for these people and I want personal information limited a bit further for this group.
Now that we’ve organized our friends into these lists, open the Privacy Settings under the Settings tab.
Clicking Privacy settings will open a page that contains the following:
Click the Profile link and you’ll be greeted with a page that lets you control how your Basic information is presented on Facebook. Basic information includes your Profile, Basic Info, Personal Info, Status Updates, Photos Tagged of You, Videos Tagged of You, Friends, Wall Posts, Education Info, and Work Info. The little “?” next to each item explains exactly what each items contains.
Click one of the popup menus next to an item and select “Customize…” and a dialog box will appear.
In this box I allow only my friends to view this information, and in the box below “Except These People”, I’ve excluded the people in the list “Do I Know You”. You could exclude people individually, but that would be pretty tedious. That’s what the friend lists are for. When I accept a new Facebook friend, I also add them to the appropriate friend list and these personal info settings are automatically applied. You can also have multiple lists and/or people excluded for each item.
Once you have all of your Basic settings how you like them, you can then navigate to your Contact Information.
Personally I feel that the items in Contact Information are the most personal and I tend to be more restrictive with who I share this information with. The items that can be configured here are: IM Screen Name, Mobile Phone, Other Phone, Current Address, Website, and email.
Lastly, you have to make certain that as you add new friends, that they get added to the appropriate list. If you don’t add them to one of your lists, then they will be able to see all of the information that you allow friends to see. This is easy enough to do. When you add or accept a friend, you are given the opportunity to add that person to one of your friend lists as illustrated to the left.
I hope this post has been of some use. If there’s anything I’ve forgotten or if you have tips you’d like to share, please do in the comments.
Cool Casey! Thanks for the tutorial! I didn’t know exactly what the friend list could do…now I think I’ll go through and try to sort everyone.
That’s good info Casey…I will have to work on that. 🙂
I would like to know your input on all the “Requests”. At times it seemed to slow my computer down on some applications so I really haven’t been accepting requests lately…you know all this “Bead Throwing” & “Poking”, etc… Craig seems to think that some viruses may be able to travel through some of the apps. What do you think?
Well, if you let all of those applications live on your Profile or Boxes then those pages might be a little slower when you load them. If your profile page goes on and on and on then the computer is going to need a little extra resources (memory) to display all that stuff. But, just having those applications installed shouldn’t really affect your computer in any other way. As for viruses, I don’t think it’s terribly likely. First, I believe that FB’s markup language limits, to a certain extent, what an application can and can’t do. And second, Facebook would quickly become aware of any application that was infecting their customers computers and would ban the developer and disable the application pretty fast. I would say you are as likely to get a virus from a FB application as you are from FB advertising. Which is to say, possible, but not very. I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. If for any reason your are suspicious about an application’s behavior then feel free to report it. There is a link on the bottom of every application page that says “Report”.
I’m an idiot. I’ve been wishing I had this flexibility since the beginning, and I just didn’t even look. Thanks for this!
Yeah well Facebook doesn’t exactly make this obvious do they? 🙂
Thanks Dude!!