Category Archives: Facebook Ad Privacy Settings

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!

Create a List, Facebook, Facebook Ad Privacy Settings

Custom Facebook Privacy Settings – Part 1

2 Comments

If you want to post something on Facebook but you don’t want all of your friends to see it, here’s what you have to do.

1. First, you need a list. Facebook allows you to create lists of your friends very easily. You can use these lists for privacy, which is what we’ll do here, or to sort out your newsfeed/friend updates. If you only want to see updates from a certain group of people, you have to make a list first.

2. Go to your own timeline, click on the box that says ‘Friends’ to bring up a list of all of your friends.

3. On your list of friends, this is a typical pop-out when you hover your cursor over a name.

Photo showing how to Create a List 1
Pick a friend who you want to add to a list.

4. See the word ‘Friends’ in the photo above? Hover over that until you see this menu:

Photo of how to Create a List 2
Hover on the word Friends to bring up this menu. Look for ‘Show all lists’

 

5. When you hover your cursor over ‘Show all lists’, the following menu will show up. This will allow you to create a new list for this friend. If you already have some lists, simply click on the list and that friend will be added to whatever list you choose.

Photo of how to Create a List 3
Down at the bottom, you’ll see ‘+ new list’. Click that.

 

6. When you click ‘+ New list’, you’ll see a small rectangle which will allow you to name the new list.

Photo of how to Create a List 4
Name your list and your friend is automatically on that list.

 

7. Now you have one list. Add friends to it by hovering your cursor over their name and clicking any list that you want them to be on. Makes sense, right?

 

OK, now you have one or more lists. Once you sort your friends into these lists, you can then move on to post things that only they will see. That’s in part two of this instructional. Stay tuned!

Thanks for reading!

Facebook, Facebook 101, Facebook Ad Privacy Settings, Facebook Secrets, Facebook Tricks, facepiles

Facebook 101 – Part 8 – The Hidden Dangers of Facepiles

4 Comments

Here are three images from Facebook facepiles, those ubiquitous groups of faces seen on an alarming number of websites:

1. This is from Seventeen Magazine.

A facepile from Seventeen Magazine
Recognize anyone? No? Neither do we.

2. This is from Girl’s Life magazine.

A facepile from the Girl's Life site
Only five but, again, these are strangers...young strangers.

3. This is from Stickam.com, a very popular teen webcam chat site.

A facepile from Stickam.com
Ten complete strangers, including one from the States. Oh, she is 17.

These Facebook facepiles are from three popular teen websites. All three show Facebook profiles of Facebook users who have clicked the ‘like’  button on the respective company’s site. Facebook tells us that this social plugin will only show the profiles of friends of the user who views the facepile. In these three cases, and many more that we’ve discovered, this is not the case. The profile photos, complete with clickable links to the user’s Facebook profile page, are all complete strangers and, in almost every case, are profiles of teen users. Some of the profiles shown are those of very young users, we should add.

Do you see a problem with this? We do. There is no harm in a facepile of your friends on a website where you and many of your friends have clicked ‘like’. There is harm in going to a website where you can easily click on someone’s profile photo and get instant access to their Facebook profile. There is even more harm if that profile belongs to a teen Facebook user, wouldn’t you agree?

Here’s what Facebook has to say about this: https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=ads

The key lines are these:

“You may see social context on third party sites, including in adverts, through Facebook social plugins. Although social plugins enable you to have a social experience on a third party site, Facebook does not share your information with the third party sites hosting the social plugins. Learn more about social plugins.”

The social plugins query leads you to this page: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/

There is nothing on that page about strangers having access to your Facebook profile. If you click the word ‘facepile’ on the left side of that page, you are taken to this page:

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/facepile/  which describes the implementation of the facepile but, again, there is no mention of the faces being clickable to either friends or strangers.

What we have here is an incomplete, and dangerous, flaw in the Facebook system. In the rush to monetize user profiles, Facebook has opened the doors to abuse of its own system. Facebook isn’t a dating site. It’s for friends, people who really know each other. Why then is it possible to click your way to profiles of complete strangers? Why is it possible for complete strangers to click their way to your Facebook profile? Something is wrong in this scenario and we really wish that Facebook would change the policy.

In previous posts, we’ve shown examples of proper implementation of the facepile social plugin, notably on the Mashable.com site. If you haven’t ‘liked’ Mashable, then you see no facepile. If you have clicked ‘like’ then you see a facepile but one that shows only your friends who have also ‘liked’ Mashable. The plugin can work the way it’s supposed to. We’re asking why it doesn’t work that way all the time.

Thanks for reading! Please share this post, retweet it, post it on Facebook, whatever it takes to clear up this problem.

 

 

 

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

Facebook 101 – Part 5 Facebook’s social plugin glitch

Leave a comment

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

Leave a comment

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!