Facebook privacy

[narmour]

For any of you who use Facebook, I thought I would share a wee experiement I've just done.

I am usually fairly careful with online privacy with things like Facebook, or so I thought. After a comment I had made, politely expressing my opinion to be conflicting with some who had set up a Facebook page in favour of current political tensions going on in Belfast (again!!), I started to receive personal messages from some ***** supporters of the page, from which I could only surmise that they had gathered personal info from my own page despite not being my friends,. This is something which I had assumed was impossible as I had set the privacy settings to maximum. To test this, I have just created a dummy profile and searched for myself. Up came my full timeline, with my name, my fiance's name, pictures of my daughter, my hometown etc etc. Whilst I have no fear for my safety from these goons, I feel it is a cautionary tale about so called security on Facebook, and I think it is time for me and Mr Zuckerberg to "defriend".

 

[calumscott]

There are many convoluted layers of privacy in Facebook. Whether intentional or not (most of it has been added piecemeal as people complain about a certain "feature"), it is spaghetti.

Private Messages - Anyone can contact you on FB. That's just the nature of the beast, without it their advertising future pipeline dries up and the share price goes through the floor. The best you can do is set filtering to "Strict" which means that the nonsense from the goons ends up in your "Other" folder which you can safely ignore.

Trouble is, when you participate in groups, you step outside your circle of "friends" and you are then basically on the public parts of FB. You *may* be able to restrict your comments individually in scope - there are options to do that.

As for your profile. Each and every tiny bit of information in there needs to be configured in separately. Go to your timeline, click "About", and you'll see "Edit" boxes beside everything. Click one of those and for each field you'll see the little "people" icon that denotes a choice you have about the audience you have for that info. Pick "Friends" or "Me Only" for everything to screw it down.

:thumb:

 

[TRXnMe]

I did that ^^ the day I was persuaded to create a FB account, if I google me now I find nothing, nada, zip, but plenty about my world famous namesakes, a rugby player, a skeet shooter and one or two other bods I knew nothing about until I tried to find me on the world wide wait

 

[IPA]

Fortunately I found out very early that you never permanently delete anything from face book once its there its there. OK Joe Bloggs cannot access it but it still belongs to MZ.

 

[Titus A Duxass]

There's no such thing as privacy on FB, data gathering and distribution is how it survives.

Don't write anything on FB that you wouldn't want to see on the front page of the Scum.