Category Archives: Adjust Default Privacy Settings

Adjust Default Privacy Settings, Controlled sharing, Facebook, Facebook Ad Privacy Settings, Facebook Groups, Facebook Tricks, Layered Privacy, Turn off location mapping

Facebook Safety Tips

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We were adjusting a few things on one of our accounts last week using the ‘View As’ feature. It must have been the first time we had used this tool because this message popped up:

Photo of Facebook's View As warning
Seems like nothing is really private, right?

 

Read that carefully folks. We’ve said it before but it’s worth repeating here: Don’t put anything on Facebook that you’ll regret later on, even if you hide it. Someone will almost certainly find it.

At about the same time, we discovered that your group affiliation is very visible, even if you hide everything about your groups from your profile. We checked one of our profiles from a different browser and there they were, all of our groups at the bottom of our profile. We’re pretty sure we weren’t signed into Facebook on that browser and had clicked on one of the facepiles on a site that we use. If we ever duplicate that glitch, we’ll be sure to save some screen captures.

Although we have written many posts about how to hide this and how to control access to that, there is one main point to keep in mind. A simple glitch on Facebook’s site has the potential to reveal anything or everything about you. That’s something to remember every time you use the site. You must also remember that Facebook itself has access to your material. Any employee with the right type of credentials could sift through your private photos, notes and messages. You may not know this but Facebook uses offshore workers to control its censorship policies. Offshore here means ‘not in North America’. Think about that the next time you post something that you think is shared only with a few friends.

We’re convinced that Facebook’s privacy controls are weak and, in many cases, ineffective. Facebook wants you to feel warm and cozy when you are on their site, using their seemingly effective privacy controls but, as we have discovered in the photo above, the controls are meaningless.

Here some safety tips that we’ve come up with. From time to time, we may add more to this list.

1. If you access the Internet on a shared computer, which is a bad idea at the best of times, make sure you remember to sign out from Facebook and, of course, don’t allow any browser to remember your password.

2. Don’t join any groups that may cause problems for you or your family. The group privacy controls are independent of your own settings and are needlessly confusing. If you feel the need to join a sketchy group, read number 3.

3. Create a second profile using a nickname or fake name and, above all, don’t use your real photo. Tell Facebook that you’re in Zimbabwe or Timbuktu, lie about your age and/or gender and access whatever scandalous groups, pages, people that you want, all in complete privacy. Use a new email address from Outlook or Gmail, not your ISP’s email setup, and only use that for the fake Facebook account. Don’t use your real name for the email account, either. Just remember that the authorities can always trace your IP address so keep all of your activities aboveboard, right?

4. Only add people that you know or have been recommended by friends. You don’t have to accept invitations from strangers. If you don’t know someone, don’t confirm the friendship. If they really persist, just block them.

5. Keep track of how your cell phone or tablet interacts with Facebook. Are you sharing your location every time you post something? Is Facebook accessing your contact list? Are you sharing more than you think you are? You have to ask yourself if Facebook is so important in your life that you might risk your own personal safety to use it. What about your children? Do they access Facebook through their cell phones? How much are they sharing? Start a dialogue with them and get some answers.

6. Create a Facebook account just for your family. If you’re going to share family pics, complete with details of your home, cars and location, make sure they are only seen by trusted family members. Once you get family mixed up with friends, you lose control of your privacy. Your family already knows where you live so you don’t have to draw a map to your house, right? Don’t share that information on Facebook . Share the cute, cuddly dog/cat/kid pics but don’t share everything!

7. Weed out your friend list, keeping in mind number 4. If there is someone you don’t know or don’t remember how you added them, get rid of them. Keep your friend list to just that, friends. If you take our advice in number 3, you can add whoever the heck you want, they won’t any danger to you.

8. This is important so read it carefully. If you are sending a message to someone that includes any personal information or is on a topic that could potentially cause problems for you, don’t send it. Use a proper and secure email system for those messages. Facebook messages may seem like email but they really aren’t. Think of them more like an interoffice memo. Facebook itself is not secure, right? How could its email system be any different?

9. If you are a teacher, don’t even think about using your real name or photo for your Facebook profile. Use a nickname, one your students don’t know, and restrict your profile photo and cover photos to ones that reveal nothing about you. You can’t hide your profile photo or any of your cover photos. Remember that.

10. If you are not a teacher, read number 9. Profile and cover photos cannot be hidden.

11. We’ve left the best till last. Here’s what a facepile looks like:

Photo of Facebook Facepile
Is your face here? Is your child’s?

These are real and clickable Facebook profile photos. Anyone, anywhere in the world can click on those photos and be taken directly to a Facebook profile. Depending on how much information that person shares, in the blink of an eye a stranger could find out a city, a street and, sometimes, an address. Go back and read number 3 again. Can you see how this facepile relates to that suggestion? If you’re going to like a page, in this case Songza, why use your real profile photo? Use your fake account and go crazy liking this and that, knowing that no one can ever connect you to anything you do on Facebook. Think about it, OK?

Those are eleven suggestions to keep safe on Facebook. There are probably at least as many more but we’ll leave those for another post. Facebook is fun, addicting but, unfortunately, very deceptive in its practices.  The nice folks there want you to share everything, like everything and toss your privacy to the wind, just so they can make money selling your profile to advertisers. Don’t let them sell you out.

Thanks for reading! Comments and suggestions are welcome, as always.

 

Adjust Default Privacy Settings, Facebook, Facebook 101, Turn Off Facebook Emals

Stop Facebook Email Notifications

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Facebook loves to clog up your email inbox with ‘important’ notifications. If you’ve made the mistake of using your primary email address to sign up for Facebook, this will create literally thousands of emails over just a few months, provided that you are an average user. Here’s how to cut those emails out of your life. If you’re on Facebook every day, you will receive these notices through your profile anyway so the emails are not important.

1. We’ll use the new Facebook look for this post but the old look is very similar. Up on the top right of any Facebook page, click the down arrow/gear icon and look for the word ‘Settings’:

Photo of Facebook Email 1
Settings first.

 

2. Look for Notifications on the top left:

Photo of Facebook Email 2
Notifications is next.

 

3. Email notifications is what we want here:

Photo of Facebook Email 3
Email notifications now.

 

4. Facebook has, believe it or not, sixty-seven topics that they want to email you about…every time one of them changes. We can’t fit them all onto one screen, we need two:

Photo of Facebook Email 4
First page of 67 possible notifications.

 

Photo of Facebook Emails 5
Second page. How can there be 67?

 

As you can see, we’ve unchecked everything. This account is not our main email account so we don’t want it cluttered up with thousands of emails. If it was our main email, it would be even worse. If you use your main email account for Facebook, you might want to leave the security notifications checked but that’s up to you. We have SMS or text messaging set up if anything bad happens to our account. We’ll do a post on Facebook security soon, just to make sure you know how to protect your account.

That’s it! No more ridiculous emails from Facebook. If you want us to do a topic on something specific, let us know. We love comments!

Thanks for reading!

 

 

Adjust Default Privacy Settings, Controlled sharing, Facebook, Facebook Secrets, Facebook Tricks, facepiles, Google +

How to Stalk on Facebook and Google +

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Warning: This post is NOT a guide to stalking. It’s a warning to everyone who doesn’t take the time to adjust their privacy settings. Facebook and Google +, thanks to their interest in making a buck for their shareholders, don’t care about your privacy. The more you reveal, the more they know. Both can adjust their ads specifically to your particular demographic, your pattern if you will, hoping you will buy something from one of those ads. If you click on something, they know about it and they remember it. As you travel around the Internet with your accounts open, they will know everywhere you go and, to a certain extent, everything you do. You’ve been warned.

Here is a step by step, do-it-yourself, stalking manual.

1. Pick a magazine, any magazine. Better yet, pick a magazine that appeals to the type of person you are looking for. Here are a couple of examples, straight from the Internet:

Photo of Stalking 1
This is from Google + but the idea is the same.

 

In the above example from Seventeen Magazine, hovering over the Google + icon brings up the ‘Follow’ button. Clicking on any profile photo brings up their Google + profile. Believe it or not, and this is the scary part, Google + seems worse than Facebook on this issue because we do not have a Google + account yet we were still able to view the profiles. It gets worse. On one of the profiles we clicked on, we were able to see two important maps. One was of the school that the person attended, the other was a map to their home, complete with street name and number,  believe it or not.

Here’s another:

Photo of Stalking 2
This is a Facebook facepile.

 

We weren’t able to find a facepile on a North American magazine site in time for this post but a magazine from Singapore had one. If you hover your mouse over a photo, the person’s name pops up. If you click on any profile photo, you are taken to that person’s Facebook page. Depending on your privacy settings, a complete stranger, even one who does not have a Facebook account, can see everything that you haven’t bothered to hide. Here is an example of someone who didn’t hide very much at all. (We were able to see this without being logged into Facebook):

Photo of Stalking 3
It’s all there, isn’t it?

 

Her school, her city, lots of photos…it’s all here. Remember, this information is available to anyone,whether they have a Facebook account or not, simply by clicking on a tiny profile photo.  Here’s what we think a stranger should see when they click on a link in a facepile:

 

Photo of Stalking 4
Still some information but not much.

 

In the example above, we can see this person’s school but not much else, other than her name. We are not signed into Facebook, by the way. This person’s profile photo is good, too. It does not reveal too much about the person. Think about your profile photo. What does it show about you? What information are you revealing to the public?

We don’t use Google + (we are in the process of figuring it out) so we can’t advise you on your privacy settings yet. With Facebook, remember that you can hide everything except your profile photo, your timeline covers and any mutual friends you have with the person who is viewing your profile, provided that you have any and that the person is signed into Facebook. There is no need to make any information public, it’s not a requirement. Choose your own level of privacy, one that you feel is secure and, most important, make sure your young friends and relatives have their privacy set to reveal the absolute minimum.

We hope this post has made you think about what information you are putting out for the world to see. What information are your children sharing with the world? What about your friends who are less comfortable with computers and/or social networking? Maybe you can refer them to us or, better yet, help them lock down their privacy using our guides.

Thanks for reading!

 

Adjust Default Privacy Settings, Controlled sharing, Facebook, Facebook Ad Privacy Settings, facepiles

When Facebook Privacy Settings Don’t Work – Part Two (May 24, 2013)

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In our last post, we discussed some facepiles that we found on a website. To catch up with us, here’s the link to that post:   When Facebook Privacy Settings Don’t Work 

In the comment section at the bottom of the Songza page, each comment has a photo and a name attached. This is how it looks:

Photo of Songza Facepile
Comments with photos and a name on the Songza site.

 

As you can see, we get a bit of information from each commenter, always a photo and a name. Why is that? Because you cannot keep your Facebook name and profile photo private, they have to be shared as part of your agreement with Facebook. Just about everything else can be hidden. Just about, those are the key words.

Yesterday, we decided to play with the settings. First, we commented, then we checked the site from another browser, just to see what we could find out from the link to the Facebook profile. Turns out the comment had the name of the poster AND his location.

We headed back to our Facebook profile and hid where the poster was from, simply by setting Location (under Privacy, then About, then Location and Edit) to ‘Only Me’. Back to Songza to refresh the page and see what the comment looked like after the change. We were shocked to see that instead of the commenter’s location, we were now able to see the commenter’s age! Knowing full well that this person had hidden their age, we headed back to Facebook in another browser to check. Sure enough, the year of birth was set to ‘Only Me’. Yes, the day and month were there for friends to see but the person’s actual year of birth was set to ‘Only Me’.

Unfortunately, we cannot duplicate this error today. The point of this post is  to show you that, while you think your privacy settings work the way Facebook tells you they do, sometimes they don’t. If you have any piece of information on Facebook that you think is completely private, there are times when it isn’t. In our next post, we’ll offer a solution, one that we’ve suggested before. Stay tuned!

Thanks for reading!

Why not Like us on Facebook? Here’s the link: Computers Made Simple on Facebook

 

 

Adjust Default Privacy Settings, Controlled sharing, Facebook, Facebook Ad Privacy Settings, facepiles

When Facebook Privacy Settings Don’t Work – May 24, 2013

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Just when you think that you’ve got your Facebook privacy settings perfectly tuned, a snag pops up. No matter how private you think your Facebook profile is, something always comes up to prove you wrong. This post is about an incident that occurred yesterday so it’s current and, to be frank, it’s troubling. See what you think.

TIP: This post might seem a bit convoluted, maybe confusing, but the point of it is this: Don’t assume that your privacy settings are locked and secure. Facebook treats its users as commodities, not individuals. You’re simply a means for them to make money. Don’t expect fair or even honest treatment.

Yesterday, May 23, 2103, one of our staffers was listening to music on Songza.com. Here’s the site: Songza – Listen to Music

To save time, he signed in with Facebook. That was a mistake, as it turns out. After choosing his playlist, this user noticed that Songza made use of  Facebook facepiles. Here is what a facepile looks like:

Photo of Facebook Facepiles 1
Technically, this isn’t a Facebook facepile but every user here is from Facebook.

You’ve seen these everywhere around the Internet, right? A box of faces from people who use or like the site. This particular facepile is a bit different from most. When you click on one of the faces, you get the user’s Songza profile, not their Facebook profile. Seems safe enough, right? We clicked on one user. This is what we found:

Photo of Facebook Facepiles 2
This is the user’s profile on Songza.

 

So far, this seems pretty straightforward, fairly innocuous. It’s not. This person’s profile name is cheryl.hatten.3  as you can see at the top. Is this that person’s Songza name or is it her Facebook name? We typed that name into the Facebook search slot and came up with this:

Photo of Facebook Facepiles 3
What’s this? A Facebook profile? Sure as hell is.

 

What do we know about Cheryl? We know her maiden name is Colley, that she probably lives in Lethbridge and that she most likely works for the Alberta Child Care Association. We also have a picture of someone who may be her daughter. Most likely Cheryl knows nothing about this. All she did was sign up for Songza by linking her Facebook account to a fairly popular and, supposedly, reputable website. Songza, in their defence, may not be fully aware of how this particular part of Facebook is being used. These websites are designed and run by professional webmasters who simply follow instructions and, as we all do, fight for their share of visitors.

Not to get too technical here, these facepiles are all part of what is called ‘Social Plugins’. If you want to know more about all of this, here is a link to the Facebook developer’s site: Social Plugins  Songza seems to have found a loophole here since their facepile is linked initially to their Songza account, not to the user’s Facebook profile. The only way you can track down the user is to do what we did, search for the user’s name on Facebook. But wait, there’s more to this than meets the eye.

Farther down the playlist page, there is a comment section. Every comment shown on the page is from a Facebook user. Here is one:

Photo of Facebook Facepiles 5
Comments with photos. No big deal here, right? You’d be surprised.

 

Let’s click on one of the photos or names to see where we are lead:

Photo of Facebook Facepiles 6
A direct link to Katherine’s Facebook profile.

Here we go again. You can see for yourself what information we can glean from this profile. If you actually go to Songza and click on any photo in the comment section then click on various parts of the profile that comes up, you’ll most likely discover all kinds of things about the person, things that they didn’t feel were worth keeping private. In several cases we found maps which indicated where they lived, what groups they were members of, what networks they were in,  who they were following and so on. Honestly, you would be surprised and probably shocked at what bits and pieces of personal information you could glean from all of this. You’d be even more surprised to find that information that you have essentially hidden by making it available to ‘Only Me’,  is wide open to the world.

Stay tuned for the next post which examines one particular flaw in the system. This flaw reveals information about you even when you have your privacy settings set to ‘Only Me’. Believe it or not, it’s true.

Thanks for reading!