Category Archives: Facebook 101

Facebook, Facebook 101, Facebook Secrets, Facebook Tricks, Hide Likes from Timeline, Timeline

Facebook 101 – Part 7 – Hiding most of your likes from your Facebook timeline

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It’s fun to share things on Facebook but it’s also prudent sometimes to hide things from your friends and family. If you absolutely love Justin Bieber, Rihanna or even Snoop Dog, maybe you don’t want to share these things with co-workers, friends or family. But you still want to keep up on what these singers are up to, just as you want to get updates on TV shows, movies, etc. We’re sure you can see why you might want to hide your entertainment likes from your Facebook timeline.

TIP: Your entertainment likes and interests are all open by default. The fact that you liked a TV show or a movie, for example, may be past history or you might add a singer to your like list. As soon as you do that, your action will show up on your timeline as well as the newsfeed and the ticker. The time to hide anything like that is before you signify that you like it. Got it?

Here’s how to get to the area you want:

Click the arrow to the right of the word Home on the top right. Choose Account Settings. On the left, look for the words: “You can also visit your privacy settings or edit your timeline to control who sees the info there”. Click ‘your timeline’ to bring up the next page. Close the Basic Info box that is open by default, then look up by your name for the word ‘About’ and the little arrow to the right of it. Click the arrow and choose ‘Likes’.

All of your default Facebook likes, such as Books, Movies, TV shows, Etc. are there. Now, some of these might be OK to have on your timeline/profile. Here is where you get to choose who sees what.

Click the word ‘Edit’ up on the top right. A list of topics follows and beside each topic is a share icon. Here you can choose what to hide from whom or what to hide from everyone. Settings are: Public, Friends, Only me (you), Custom and so on. Custom is the one you would choose if you want to hide the fact that you like Justin Beiber from your daughter, for example, but not all of your other friends. Make sure you click ‘Done Editing’ when you are finished.

These like lists were part of the original Facebook, long before you could simply like a page. They describe you to other people, sure, but maybe you don’t want everyone to know you like the Yankees if you live in Boston.

In our last post we described how to hide page likes from your timeline and you might want to go back to that article here: Hide Page Likes from your Timeline. 

Thanks for reading!

Tip: You cannot hide photo likes or comments or the fact that you liked a comment or note or album on Facebook. Your only choice is to ‘unlike’ or delete your comment. Pretty much everything else is able to be hidden. Read our past posts to find out how.

 

Facebook, Facebook 101, Facebook Secrets, Facebook Tricks, Hide Likes from Timeline

Facebook 101 – Part 6 – How to hide page likes on Facebook

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Here’s now to hide page likes from your Facebook timeline. Page likes don’t show up on the newsfeed or side ticker, only on your timeline. There is no reason why anyone needs to know that you like a certain company’s page or some megastar’s page either. That’s your business, isn’t it? Here’s how to keep that information off of your timeline.

1. Log-in to Facebook and head over to your Profile page. Basically, click on your name, just the right of center. That will bring up your timeline.

2. Click on the Activity Log box just to the right of your name.

3. Anything you have done in the last little while is at the top. To the right of each entry is an icon. If you have liked a Facebook page, it will show up there.

4. Click the icon on the far right and choose ‘Hide from timeline’. You’re done.

You have to be quick about this. Make sure you have Facebook open and are logged in before you like a page that you want to hide from your timeline. Go the page and like it, then head back to your profile and follow the steps we’ve described above. No one but you will know what pages you like.

Thanks for reading! Next up is hiding your other likes on your timeline and from the newsfeed or ticker.

TIP: Remember that you cannot hide the fact that you liked a photo or a comment or that you made a comment on a photo. All of those things are wide open and show up on both your timeline and your friend’s newsfeeds and tickers. There’s nothing you can do about any of that except unlike the photo or delete the comment. Watch out for that, OK?

Facebook, Facebook 101, Facebook Ad Privacy Settings, Facebook Tricks

Facebook 101 – Part 5 Facebook’s social plugin glitch

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As with almost everything about Facebook, what follows is a cautionary tale about Facebook’s use of social plugins to connect people on the Internet. We see this as a potentially dangerous flaw which opens everyone’s Facebook profile to virtually everyone on the Internet. This glitch is easier to illustrate than it is to explain in words. We’ll run you through it step by step:

1. Sign out of your Facebook account or open the following links in another browser.

2. Head over to each of these sites:

http://www.theepochtimes.com/

http://mashable.com/

3. Look on the right hand side of the page in the column with links and ads in it.

4. You should immediately see a difference between the two pages when you locate the Facebook social plugin box or, as it is sometimes called, the facepile. In the Epoch Times facepile, there are ten Facebook profiles shown, each with a link to that person’s Facebook profile. If you click on one of the faces, you should be taken directly to that person’s Facebook profile, even though you aren’t signed in to Facebook. Depending on that person’s privacy settings, you might be able to scout around their profile, see their photos and find out their activities and interests. Not only have you probably not ‘liked’ that page, you’re not even signed-in to Facebook! 

5. On the Mashable page, you should see only a small blurb that says ‘900,000 (+ or – ) people  like this.’ There is a ‘Like’ button with a thumbs up icon that, if clicked, brings up a Facebook sign-in page.

6. In the same browser you are using for the two sites mentioned above, open another tab and sign-in to Facebook.

7. Head back to the two tabs which show the above links. Refresh each page.

8. Nothing has changed on the Epoch Times page except that now when you click on one of the profile photos, you are taken directly to that person’s full profile page or their timeline, complete with everything that they have decided to share with strangers such as yourself.

9. On the Mashable site, you might see a few photos of your friends, depending on whether any of your friends have liked the Mashable site. This is how the social plugin is supposed to work, as far was we can tell. We are in the process of emailing the webmasters involved to see if they can help us spot the glitch here.

With this quick experiment in Facebook privacy, we hope you can see the danger in all of this. The whole point of the social plugins is to share content between friends, to make the vast Internet a bit smaller. In reality, the social plugin has opened up Facebook user profiles to the whole Internet. As we have shown in the above example, you don’t even have to use Facebook to be able to see Facebook profiles. Seeing a profile is as simple as clicking on a profile photo on a website.

We know, of course, that you can also search Google for someone’s Facebook profile. The difference here is that searching on Google takes a few steps. It’s not as simple as clicking on a photo. You could theoretically search for everyone named Bob, for example, and click your way through the profiles until you came to an interesting one. With this particular glitch, stalking someone is as easy as clicking on a photo of someone who looks interesting.

Lastly, if you think that this doesn’t work to anyone’s advantage, consider the fact that we’ve added people to our friend list simply by clicking on their profile photo on a site and then clicking ‘Add Friend’. Of course Facebook asks us if we know the person, and we don’t, but they accepted our invitation anyway. We hope you can see how this carries many inherent dangers, especially where young Facebook users are concerned.

We are working on a way to change our privacy settings to eliminate this glitch but, until then, check out what pages your young children might have clicked ‘like’ on. Remind them not to accept friendship invitations from strangers.

Thanks for reading. If you have any inside knowledge about this, please let us know.

 

 

Facebook, Facebook 101, Facebook Ad Privacy Settings, Facebook Tricks, Privacy

Facebook 101 – Part 4 – Keep yourself out of ads

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The biggest danger on Facebook isn’t spending too much time there, believe us when we say that. The biggest danger is that your profile photo could end up supporting some company halfway across the world without you even knowing about it. While privacy settings in Facebook are important, we think the settings in this post are the most important.

To keep things short and sweet, follow us to the page you want to focus on:

1. From any Facebook page, click on the down arrow to the right of the word ‘Home’ and choose ‘Privacy Settings’. When you get to the next page, look for ‘Ads, Apps and Websites’. To the right, click on Edit Settings. That will bring you to this page:

Opt out of Facebook ads on Internet sites
This is where you opt out of the Facebook ads that are everywhere on the Internet.

All of these settings are important, don’t get us wrong. But we feel the most important one is the last one, Ads. Click on the words ‘Edit Settings’ on the bottom right. That will bring you here:

Choose your Facebook ad settings here.
You're not there yet but you're a bit closer. Read all of this stuff for your own edification.

The important words here are: Facebook does not give third party applications or ad networks the right to use your name or picture in ads. If we allow this in the future, the setting you choose will determine how your information is used.

Facebook is telling you that, for now, they don’t let other people use your name and photo in ads. For now. If that changes, this is where you can choose to NOT be in those ads…ever. Anyone who chooses to be in those ads is visible anywhere on the Internet on any site that they have liked or commented on. You’ve seen the little Facebook ads, right? Here is one, just to give you an idea of what we mean:

This is where your profile photo might end up.
Do you really want your face to appear on pages like this?

Each of these photos is a direct link to the people shown. See someone that looks interesting (read: cute, sexy, interesting, stalkable)? Well, just click the photo and there you are at her/his Facebook profile. You may be OK with all of this but if you have children, how would you feel about seeing their photos in an ad? We think it’s something to protect yourself from.

Look for the words ‘Edit third party ad settings’ and click them. In the middle, make sure the words ‘No one’ are there. If they aren’t click the black arrow and choose ‘No one’. Make sure you click Save Changes next and you’re safe.

Click Save Changes and you’ll be back to the previous page. Perform the same actions for ‘Ads and friends’ in order to make sure that your profile pic isn’t used in ‘social ads’.

You’re done. Good for you. You can relax and enjoy the many other non-threatening parts of Facebook. This particular advice is more important for teens (and sub-teens) we think. While you are supposed to be a certain age to join Facebook, everyone knows that many young people have accounts. It seems a bit dangerous to us for these kid’s profile photos be be spread all around the ‘net. We’ll also add that getting to this particular privacy setting sure isn’t intuitive. It seems that Facebook might have hidden them, just a guess.

We’ve discussed the other privacy settings in another post. Read about them here: Facebook privacy settings  We hope you find what you’re looking for there. Let us know if you can’t figure it out. We’ll help.

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

Facebook, Facebook 101, Facebook Games, Facebook Secrets, Facebook Tricks

Facebook 101 – Part 3 Games!

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One of the best parts of Facebook, depending on how much time you have to spare, is the games that you can play. Facebook games are everywhere it seems. Once you get some friends added to your list, they will very likely start to send you invitations to join them in their favorite online games. We’re not going to explain each game here but they run the gamut from intelligent word games through silly cooking games to amusing ‘I spy’ ones. Some are copies of board games you know while others are designed specifically for Facebook.

When it comes time to add a game on Facebook, the process is deceptively simple…on the surface. There are some things you should be concerned with, however. We’ll run through the process for you and, hopefully, make it as painless as possible. We’re not against the games that are everywhere on Facebook, we’re just a bit concerned about the way they reach out to your other friends and pretty much spam the heck out of them. We’ll help you avoid the traps.

TIP: Part of the game experience on Facebook is building your own neighborhood or network in each one. Some games are more dependent on the number of friends that you play or interact with than others. Some of your friends are more interested in games, to the point of becoming fanatical about them, than other friends who don’t even play games. Remember to limit yourself at the start to friends who you know  play games and enjoy being added to your own field of play. If you’re not careful, you’ll start to lose friends simply because of the game spam that is possible on Facebook.

Here’s what you see when you want to start playing a game. Facebook wants you to know what the game will know about you and how it interacts with you, that kind of thing:

Adding a game to Facebook
This is where you say yes and get to play, or no and don't get to play.

Here you see some details on how the game is going to work with you, or against you, on Facebook. In order to play the game, you have to accept this agreement. You can change the email settings later, we’ll show you how, but for now, there is only one part that you can change. Do you really want your friends to know you are playing this game? If you’re OK with that, and in most cases it’s fine, look down on the bottom left and choose your level of openness.  You can change your setting here before you click Play Game. Where you see the word Friends in this photo, click on the little arrow to bring down this menu:

Sharing settings
Choose who you want to share your game posts with here.

This is where you decide who gets to see your actions in the game, your successes, your scores and if you beat someone badly. Take note of the last one. If you cream somebody in Words With Friends, do you think they would like everyone to know about it? Ah, the pleasure and dangers of games on Facebook, right? Take note of this menu because you can use it in other places as well as here. The last one on the top list is ‘Custom’. That is where you choose to share with some friends but not others. Keep that in mind when you are sharing certain kinds of things. It might come in handy.

OK, so once you’ve set all that up, click on Play Game and have some fun. What follows is fairly self-explanatory. The rules are there, the scores, everything you need. All the games will try to push you to spend money but DON’T! There is no need at all to spend anything on Facebook. Don’t even think about giving Facebook or a game your credit card information!

Once you’re comfortable with the game, head back to your main page and set some privacy settings for that game. Click on Facebook up on the top left of the page then click on the arrow to the right of the word Home on the top right of that page. On the menu that pops down, click on Account Settings. Then, on the top left again, click on the word Apps.

The game you just added should be there on that page. This is the menu that you want to see:

Choose your privacy settings here.
Sort out everything here before you forget.

If you don’t want the game to email you, click on the words ‘The app sends you a notification’ and choose ‘Never’. That way your email inbox won’t be full of stuff from the game, right? Then choose who can see the game’s posts on your timeline and you’re all set. Click ‘Close’ and you’re done!

Next time we’ll discuss how to opt out of appearing in Facebook ads all across the Internet. Believe it or not, it’s possible that your profile pic could be seen by millions of people all over the world without you even knowing about it. Next post, folks. Be there!

Thanks for reading. Comments, questions, they’re all welcome.