Category Archives: Adjust Default Privacy Settings

Adjust Default Privacy Settings, Controlled sharing, Facebook, Facebook Secrets, Facebook Tricks

Facebook Privacy Shortcuts

Leave a comment

Facebook recently introduced a new interface (the thing that you see when you check out your Timeline). You may not have noticed the new privacy shortcuts, however. Here’s a quick guide to how to use them.

1. Click on your profile photo from anywhere in Facebook to get to your Timeline. Up at the top are some new icons. Here is what they look like:

 

Photo of Facebook Privacy Shortcuts 1
Look for the gear and padlock icons.

The gear icon hasn’t changed much. It leads to your account and privacy settings. The ‘Advertise’ link is new, we’ll explain that another time, but the links are pretty much the same as before. Here they are:

Photo of Facebook Privacy Shortcuts 2
Same old, same old except for ‘Advertise’. What the heck is that? Details later.

 

2. To the left of the gear, look for the padlock icon. It’s the one that we’re dealing with today. Instead of going to a completely different Facebook page, you can adjust your settings from your Timeline. Here’s a rundown of the different menus:

Photo of Facebook Privacy Shortcuts 3
Three icons with a down arrow to the right.

Here’s where you can change ‘Who can see my stuff?’ and ‘Who can contact me’ as well as ‘How do I stop someone from bothering me?’

 

3. One by one :

Photo of Facebook Privacy Shortcuts 3
Adjust your post setting here. There are two links to other tools, your Activity Log and the View As feature.

 

4. Next we have the ‘Who can contact me?’ settings:

Photo of Facebook Privacy Shortcuts 5
This setting is quite odd, isn’t it?

If you can tell us why Facebook uses such nebulous English, we’d love to know. It seems to us that ‘Basic Filtering’ would let your friends contact you but prevent strangers from sending you messages. Instead, neither setting makes any sense. Why would you want to receive messages from some friends and not others? How can you determine who can send a message?

As for the ‘Strict Filtering’, why would you miss messages from some friends? The ‘Mostly just friends’ line seems to say that only certain friends can get through the filter. This is, bluntly, absurd.

Lastly, choose who can send you friend requests.

5. If you have blocked someone on Facebook, you’ll remember that the process was fairly difficult. With the new shortcuts, it’s substantially easier.

Photo of Facebook Privacy Shortcuts 6
Start typing a name, then click Block when you find the right person.

 

6. The See More Settings link down at the bottom leads to this page:

Photo of Facebook Privacy Shortcuts 7
These are more settings that you can adjust. We’ll do another post specifically on this page at a later date.

 

That’s enough for today. Play with the settings here to control who sees what and who can contact you, etc. Again, Facebook has made this more confusing than necessary but, at least, the controls are easier to find. Let us know if you have a problem with any of this.

Thanks for reading!

Adjust Default Privacy Settings, Controlled sharing, Facebook, Facebook Ad Privacy Settings, Facebook Games, Facebook Secrets, Facebook Tricks

Facebook Games and Apps – something to think about

Leave a comment

As we all know, Facebook plays pretty fast and loose with your personal information. How fast and loose? Take a look that this notice that popped up when we were removing Farmville from one of our Facebook accounts:

Photo of Facebook Games 1
What? Farmville may still have our data???

Once Facebook has shared your data with Farmville why do you have to go to Farmville to get them to delete it? Wouldn’t deleting Farmville from your Facebook account be sufficient? Looks like it’s not. You have to scramble around to ask a game to delete your own data. All the more reason to use a dummy profile to play games.

If you’re tired of worrying about Facebook sharing your data as you travel around the Internet, try this. Go to your privacy page, top right of any page and click on the down arrow and choose Privacy Settings. Once you’re there, look for Apps and Websites. Click on Edit Settings. Here’s the page that comes up:

Photo of Facebook Games 2
This is where you can change your game privacy settings.

Right now, this user has allowed 28 games or applications, including websites, access to their personal information. In the last few days, 5 apps/games have accessed that information. (We’ll show you how to limit some of this access in a later post.)

What if all of this third party sharing is not for you? From the looks of this page, Facebook is sharing everything about you with everyone. Lets change that. In the middle of this page, look for this:

Photo of Facebook Games 3
The highlighted words ‘Turn off” will stop the sharing.

 

If you click on the words ‘Turn off’, none of your personal information will be shared with apps or games or websites outside of Facebook. The upside is that your data is substantially more private, the downside is that you won’t be able to play games or interact with websites the way you did before. Depending on who you are, this could be a good thing. Here’s what you see when you click on those words:

Photo of Facebook Games 4
The warning is self-explanatory.

 

One click and you’re done. None of your games will show up on your Facebook page, your notices won’t include game updates or requests and you won’t be hounded to ‘Sign in with Facebook’ when you travel around the Internet. If you don’t like this, head back to the same page and ‘Turn on’ what you just turned off. Or, you could just play a game. Read the next tip.

TIP: Even though you have turned off Apps, Plugins and Websites and received the dire warning posted above, Facebook does not warn you that your privacy is being invaded the next time you play a game. Read that again, we’ll wait. 

Facebook is eager to warn you when you turn off Apps, Plugins and Websites, right? It’s curious that there is no warning when you turn this on, isn’t it? All you have to do is play a game, even a game that you had been playing before you turned this off, and everything is back to normal. Your personal data is being shared outside of Facebook all over again.

Facebook is full of tricks and missteps, isn’t it? It’s like walking in a minefield blindfolded sometimes. We strongly suggest a secondary, anonymous account when playing games and ‘liking’ web pages. You never know when something you’ve done on Facebook will come back to haunt you later on. Use one account for friends and another for everything else. Using two browsers on a modern fast computer is simple and saves time logging in. Keep your main account on Chrome and your play account in Explorer, example.

Next time, we’ll tell you how to adjust your app and game settings to protect at least some of your privacy. Stay tuned!

Thanks for reading! Like us on Facebook and get instant notification of our posts: https://www.facebook.com/ComputersMadeSimple?ref=hl

 

Adjust Default Privacy Settings, Data Use Policy Update, Facebook, Fotobounce

Protect Facebook Photos from Bulk Downloaders

Leave a comment

We’ve written about Fotobounce before, here and here . Fotobounce allows you to download full photo albums from  friends or pages that you like on Facebook. Yesterday, we got involved in a discussion about precisely this activity. Some of our artist or photographer friends objected to friends and/or complete strangers downloading their photos and using them on other social media sites. While we agreed that there is a case to be made here, we pointed out that simply putting something on Facebook is telling the world that it’s OK to copy/share/use etc. Anyway, that’s not the point today. In this post, we’ll teach you how to defeat Fotobounce from stealing your photos. (Stealing is a strong word but it kind of fits here.)

Deep inside Facebook’s privacy page, in an area that you probably wouldn’t get to on your own, there is a section that will allow you to prevent Fotobounce from downloading your photo albums. Here’s how to do it:

1. On the top right of any Facebook page, click on the down arrow like this:

Photo of Block Fotobounce 1
Click on Privacy Settings

2. Once you get to the Privacy Settings page, look for the section that says ‘Ads, Apps and Websites’. Click on ‘Edit Settings’.

Photo of Block Fotobounce 2
Click on Edit Settings

 

3. When the next page pops up, look for the section that says ‘How people bring your info to apps they use’.

Photo of Block Fotobounce 3
Click on Edit Settings

 

4. Finally, you’re at the page we want. This is how it probably looks the first time you see it:

Photo of Block Fotobounce 4
Most things are checked on this page. This isn’t good.

What you see here are the controls for what parts of your information Facebook apps can use. This is completely separate from what your friends can see or what strangers can see. We’ve already covered hiding things from your friends in many previous posts. Right now, we want to stop any Facebook apps from using your personal information including your photo albums. 

5. You’ll have to take our word for it but ignore the last line: “But, remember, you will not be able to use any games or apps yourself.” That line is total baloney. 

TIP: Despite what Facebook and games such as Farmville tell you, games and apps do not need access to anything other than your Basic Information. Check the photo below. Basic Information is not something that can be hidden anyway.  If you uncheck everything on that page, you will still be able to play games as usual. Please note that you can also limit what parts of your Basic Information that anyone can see. More on that in a future post. 

6. Here is how one of our accounts looks after we fixed our app settings:

Photo of Block Fotobounce 5
Nothing is checked and we can still play games. Looks like Facebook lied.

 

7. You see above that nothing is checked. Apps cannot see anything about this profile. Neither can websites or, supposedly, games. At least that’s what Facebook tells you. More on that in a future post. The good news is that Fotobounce will not be able to access your photos at all. Not only will they not be able to download them, your photos are not even visible in Fotobounce.

We advise you to take these steps immediately to protect your personal data from being spread across websites and Facebook apps and games. Once everything is unchecked, your own Facebook experience won’t change. You won’t notice any difference. Then again, you won’t be shocked when your face shows up on a website or game somewhere, either. That, we think, is worth the few minutes that this process takes.

Thanks for reading! Stay in touch on Facebook, too. Here’s the Computers Made Simple Facebook page link: https://www.facebook.com/ComputersMadeSimple?ref=hl

Adjust Default Privacy Settings, Facebook, Facebook Ad Privacy Settings, Facebook Secrets

Facebook Privacy Fix

Leave a comment

We’ve written many posts that help you hide different parts of your Facebook persona. This post will help you hide things outside of Facebook, those things that you don’t even know you are sharing.

Facebook makes its money by selling information about you to other websites. Basically, they sell your likes and dislikes in order for companies to better target their approach to get you to spend money. These pieces of information include the websites you visit, your email address, what ads you click on, etc. Facebook also tracks your activity as you travel around the Internet. How much money does Facebook make off of all of this? Well, one of our Facebook accounts generated just under $1,000 a year for Facebook. Multiply that by a few million Facebook users and you can see why Facebook is so interested in everything you do online.

A new app is available that helps you hide yourself from Facebook’s prying eyes. PrivacyFix, available here: https://privacyfix.com/start  works inside either Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. Go to the site, allow PrivacyFix to access your Facebook data and you’ll soon be invisible, at least as far as Facebook’s web customers are concerned.

Photo of Privacy Fix
Click on the “Run PrivacyFix Setup” button. Follow the prompts.

Once you run the setup, PrivacyFix helps you close the gaps in your Facebook privacy settings. Quite honestly, we thought our settings were fairly secure but found out that we were wrong. Read the prompts carefully and let PrivacyFix repair everything for you.

The only part that we found didn’t work well was when we were trying to email companies who had our information, asking them to delete any details that they have. PrivacyFix uses the old-fashioned ‘mailto’ link for this. That only works if you have an email client, let’s say Windows Live Mail (new) or Outlook Express (old), set up and ready to send out emails. Most of use webmail such as Gmail or Yahoo or Hotmail. This particular step did not work at all and we’re curious why they used this old-style script. We’ll investigate and update this when we find the answer.

Using PrivacyFix, our value to Facebook has gone down from just under $1000 to just under $10. For a few minutes work, we think that’s pretty good. Let us know how you’re worth, both before and after.

Thanks for reading!

Adjust Default Privacy Settings, Controlled sharing, Facebook, Facebook page likes, Hide Game Updates, Hide Likes from Timeline

Deleting Posts from your Facebook Timeline

Leave a comment

There are several ways to hide your page likes from showing up in your Facebook news feed or on your timeline. We’ve shown you how to hide individual likes in previous posts. This time, we want to show you how to hide groups of things from your timeline.

All of this is done from your own Facebook timeline so head there now.  Depending on your settings, you’ll probably see big boxes with titles such as Activity, Friends, Photos, Likes, etc. These big boxes match up with the little boxes with the same names, the ones just below and to the right of your name.

First, lets figure out what boxes we want to share with our friends. Click the small down arrow just to the right of the number of boxes you have in that section. This person has six. This is the box we are looking for:

Photo of Cleaning up your Facebook Timeline 1
Click the little box with the number in it. You can’t edit your Favorite boxes until you do.

 

Once you click on that box, you can edit and shift the various boxes around. Each main box on the second row has an editable icon on the top right, just hover your cursor there. Two boxes do not have edit icons: Friends and Photos. You can hide your full friend list elsewhere but clicking this box will show either your full friend list or mutual friends that you have with whoever is looking at your timeline. Your photo box can’t be hidden or changed but you can, of course, limit your audience to any photo that you post yourself. Any of the other boxes can be swapped with anything else or you can remove that box from your Favorites. (All of these boxes are named Favorites.) Here is a menu of what you can do with the boxes:

Photo of Cleaning up you Facebook Timeline 2
Arrange your boxes or remove a box completely. You can add it back later.

 

If you have removed a box from your Favorite boxes, you can add it back. Hover your cursor on the top right of any blank box on the top row and choose which box you want to add back. Here is the menu you see when you click the edit icon:

Photo of Cleaning up you Facebook Timeline 3
Pick a box name and add it back.

 

Just for fun, here is a glitch that we discovered in this section of the timeline. It looks like a menu where you can type in your own name but, unfortunately, it doesn’t work. This is what we saw:

Photo of Cleaning up you Facebook Timeline 4
It would be nice to make up your own name for a Favorite box, wouldn’t it?

Move down the page and find the post that shows that you’ve recently added a friend.  Click on the edit button on the top right of that box and you’ll get to hide that whole activity, not just the one single post.

Photo of Cleaning up you Facebook Timeline 5
Hide all friending activity  with the click of a mouse.

 

Facebook apps love to post every damn thing you do when you’re playing games. You can hide all posts by any game but, unfortunately, you have to do this game by game. Here’s one of the game menus which allows you to stop them from cluttering your timeline:

Photo of Cleaning up you Facebook Timeline 6
Remove all actions. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

 

Work your way down your own timeline and see what you can hide and what you can’t. Each time you do this sort of exercise, you will become more comfortable with maintaining your privacy on Facebook. By nature, Facebook is all about sharing but we think that you should be in control of what you share. We’ll help you all we can to figure it out.

 

Thanks for reading! Comments, questions, problems are all welcome. Follow us on Facebook to get the latest updates. Here the link:  Computers Made Simple