Are you a Fan of something on Facebook?
Facebook privacy policy has been creating some stir out on the web already. Like every Facebook user, I have been trying to be careful when posting things on the Facebook. Moreover, I have created friend groups. As I have pre-defined access levels assigned for each of these groups, all I have to do is to add all my friends to the appropriate groups. Moreover, I make sure I do add new friends to a group too. In this way, everyone has an appropriate access level in my friend’s list.
Pages are your friends and they have all the access
I was shocked recently when I figured out that all the pages I am a Fan of, are showing up in my friend’s list. Wow, what is that supposed to mean? Well, anything that is posted on those pages are posted on my profile and everything I post on Facebook will also appear on that page’s feed too. So if you think posting your family photos is safe because you know who has access to that post, you are mistaken. The photos will actually get posted onto the Page you are a fan of. Facebook does give you an option of adding a newly added friend to a group, but ironically when you Fan a page, there’s obviously no reason of adding the page to a group. Hence all your posts are visible to the Page you are a fan of.
How to fix that? From your Facebook home page click on Account -> Edit Friends . You will see the list of your friends. You will be surprised to see that the pages you became Fan of, are showing up as your friends. You can either click the small cross next to the name to remove yourself from being the Fan of that page, or you can add this Page to one of your Friend’s Group to give similar access level.
Now it adds one more step for me, if I become a fan of a page, I should go set its privacy setting too to make sure my content dont openly get posted to these pages.
Everything you post is visible to everyone in your Networks
Then you have Networks that you have joined. Your college, school, locality, city networks and so on. By default, your posts and content are public to these groups as well. That means, everyone from your old school whose group you joined, can view your content. Crazy, is’nt it? Make sure you revoke this access from Account->Privacy Settings-> select each of your online item and set its access level. Yeah, I know its tedious but that’s how Facebook wants it. They want it all to be public.
Posting and Privacy Guidelines
In general, one should follow these guidelines to ensure you are not compromising your privacy:
- Don’t post anything online that you think should not be posted in public.
- If you post something online thinking it is appropriate for now, think if it will be appropriate to stay online in the future? If not, just don’t post.
- And then what you post online, make sure you have absolutely clear privacy settings defined. This is tricky because you’ll have to be as efficient as a watch dog to keep updating them for every new user joining your network and things even get worse with every update of the privacy policy of social networks.
Happy social networking. Keep your private content private!
I’m sure you must have heard about Google+ by now, it’s yet another social network by Google. It feels that they are palnning to do it right this time, let’s see how good it will be in the days to come. All we can do is jump in, try using it and give our feedback. So first thing first, how to get into Google+.
