Category Archives: Facebook Secrets

Adjust Default Privacy Settings, Create a List, Facebook, Facebook Secrets, Facebook Tricks, Layered Privacy

Layered Privacy on Facebook – Part 2

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In our last post we divided our Facebook friends into different lists (groups). Here’s the link, in case you missed it: Layered Privacy on Facebook – Part 1  This time we’ll show you how to separate your posts and some of your activity, in order to keep the posts from being seen by everyone on your friend list.

Remember that anything you comment on that isn’t yours is wide open. You can’t hide anything that isn’t your own, including comments that you make on another person’s photo,note,share, or post. No can do!

OK, now that we have that straightened out, here’s how to control who sees what you post:

1. Go to your normal Facebook page, not your Timeline. Click on the word Facebook up on the top left.

2. We’re going to add a photo as a test. Click on Add Photo/Video to bring up this menu:

Photo of Facebook menu
Note that the current default setting is ‘Friends’. Keep that in mind for later.

 

3. Click on the little down arrow just to the right of the word Friends. Your menu may differ, depending on your default privacy setting. (It may say Public which is a big no-no. Nothing you post should be shared with the Public unless you are a celebrity or a celebrity wannabe.) Whatever it says, click on the down arrow to bring up a menu that looks like this:

Photo of Facebook Menu
Look for ‘See all lists’ at the bottom.

 

4. Click on the words ‘See all lists’ to bring up the following menu which will show all of the lists that you made last time. Here it is:

Photo of Facebook Menu
All of your lists will be shown on this menu. You might need to scroll up or down to see them all.

 

5. For this exercise, we’re going to share it with our Family, no one else. Click on Family (or some other group) to put a check mark beside it. If you don’t have a list or group named Family, choose another one. If you see where this is going, skip out of class and do something else. The last section is important though, so maybe you want to stick around.

Photo of Facebook Menu
We’ve chosen Family here but you’re on your own. Choose any group you want or choose multiple groups.

 

6. Once you choose which lists you want to share your photo with, you can upload the pic. Only those lists that you’ve chosen will be able to see or comment on the photo. No one else will see the photo or the comments on it.

You’re done. However, if you sort out your Facebook posts using this method, there is one more thing to remember. Read this:

Tip: Whatever your setting was for your last post, that setting is now your default setting. If you chose Family as the list you will share your photo/note/video with, your next photo/note/video or share will be visible to only that list. Read that again if you’re not clear on it. You have to change the setting for everything you post from now on. Safer, perhaps, but kind of a pain, too. 

This is important. Let’s say you post a questionable pic and share it with the wrong group. Oooops! After all of this ranting about layered privacy, we still think it’s best to have separate Facebook accounts. This isn’t crucial unless you are kind of ‘out there’, right? If you just post pics of kittens and fishing trips and weddings, stick with this method. If you have a wild night life and a staid home life, think having two or more Facebook accounts.

As always, questions and comments are welcome. Our Facebook posts are the most popular on this site. If you want us to write about something that’s bugging you, let us know in a comment.

Thanks for reading!

 

Adjust Default Privacy Settings, Facebook, Facebook Secrets, Facebook Tricks, Turn off location mapping

Facebook – Guard your privacy

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If Facebook had its way, we would have no walls on our houses and we’d all be wearing ID chips to show our current location. If you think this idea is something from science fiction, think again. Right now, many of you are telling Facebook and Twitter and Foursquare and WeChat(Weixin) and other social networking sites exactly where you are. Here’s some what-ifs for you.

1. What if you had a stalker, someone from work or school or your neighborhood, who really wanted to get closer to you? How would he or she do that? Well, getting you to add him or her was a friend on Facebook would be a start. Do you know all of your friends? Do you know if they are really who they say they are? Chances are, if you connect to social networking through your mobile device or tablet, you’re opening yourself up to this kind of sketchy activity.

2. Do you drive a fancy car, say a Mercedes or BMW? To most people, driving a fancy car is a status symbol. That’s easy to figure out, isn’t it? Let’s say that some burglar is looking for a nice score in your neighborhood. Let’s say they figure out your name and address. With a bit of work, they could track you on some social networking site and know when you are not at home. That’s a lot easier than your might think. Even if you are just out shopping, maybe across town or in the next city, and you connect to one of your social networking sites through your phone, you are most likely telling that burglar exactly where you are and approximately how long it will be before you return home. You might as well leave a sign on your door, “Out for a bit, help yourself.”

3.  You are applying for a job or an internship and someone wants to see what kind of person you are, aside from your resume or application. Maybe you’re in a bar, having a rousing good time and you tweet about it, maybe post some pics on Facebook, and maybe this bar you’re in just isn’t too classy. We’re thinking of somewhere that might have exotic dancers, mud- wrestling or midget tossing, you know? Sure, you are free to go to those places but do you really want future employers to know about it before they get to know the real you? Go ahead, tweet/post/comment from wherever you want but once you give any social media the ability to pinpoint your current location, you’re opening the door to this kind of snooping.

Photo of mobile phone with Facebook statuses on it.
In this photo, Kevin is away for the weekend. We even know where he is. Can you see any danger in posting that information?

 

TIP: Get to know your mobile device or tablet. Figure out where you can turn your location settings off, or on, depending on your personal wishes. We’re not saying that telling others where you are is a bad thing, it’s just that sometimes it’s definitely not a good thing.

 

Here is a link that we found which describes real situations where location mapping caused problems. Check it out and, hopefully, this will reinforce out point:

http://blog.sherweb.com/geo-tagging-convenience-can-be-dangerous/

 

Thanks for reading!

Controlled sharing, Facebook, Facebook page likes, Facebook Secrets, Facebook Tricks, Hide Likes from Timeline, Timeline

Facebook Likes – The Ultimate Guide – Part Four

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This post is strictly for your Likes, the ones that your Like box is linked to. Go to your Facebook timeline and click on the Like box. This is that page that will pop up:

Photo of Like editing page
See the word Edit up on the top right? Click it.

The next page, after you click the Edit button, looks like this:

 

Photo of Editing your Likes 2
This is where you choose what to show and what to hide.

This is a long page, starting with your Favorites. (The photo reads Favourites because we’re in Canada and use the British spelling.) Your page of Likes is made up of both your favorites as well as the pages you like. The pages are all at the bottom.  Right now, let’s look at the Music box. You can do two things with each favorite. You can show it or hide it. If you decide to show it, you can choose who you want to see it or who you want to hide it from, the same as if you post a photo on Facebook.

Once you decide who you want to share this favorite box with, you’re left with showing them every type of music you like. You can’t break up this box into pieces, say Techno being one piece that you don’t mind showing and Andy Williams being another piece that you don’t want to show. If you show your music to anyone, they see all of the music you like. If you want to hide old Andy, you have to hit the X beside their name to delete it.

The same applies to all of the topics that Facebook thinks should be listed as Favorites, whether they be books, TV, movies or whatever. If you want to hide your Favorites from someone or only show them to a group of friends, click on the icon on the right. That will bring up this menu:

Photo of Favorite share menu
Sort out this menu as best you can. This applies to the particular favorite you are working on, not every single one of them.

You can see from the photo above that you can hide a particular favorite from some people but you can’t hide only one of those individual items unless you hide the whole group of favorites. Get it? If you like Madonna in your Music favorites and you show your Music favorites to your friends, you can’t hide the fact that Madonna is in that group.

Useless Favorites Tip:  These favorites are really useless in the whole scheme of things to share on Facebook. The only reason they are even on your timeline is to open yourself up a bit to your friends. You may have an acquaintance who knows a bit about you but they didn’t know that you like Bladerunner (a movie). Once they find out that you like something, they have a fuller picture of you as a person and, possibly, might feel better about chatting with you about similar interests. Having a favorite in this group doesn’t mean that you’ll get inundated with offers or emails or updates on anything. These favorites are just there in order for people to get to  know you better.  Hide them, show them, it doesn’t matter.

 

Let’s move on to items that actually get updated every now and then, Facebook pages. As you know, Facebook pages are full of information, updates as well as photos and links, all pertaining to the person or company that created the page. Virtually every star, celebrity or company has a Facebook page. If they don’t, they’re missing the boat.

Facebook Page Likes – Options Available

As far as Facebook page likes go, you can hide them or show them as a group. Yes, you can show or hide them all to whatever group of friends you choose but you cannot hide one of the pages and show the others. This is the same as your other favorites, it’s all or nothing. All means every page you like will be shown to whoever you show any page you like. You can’t pick and choose what to show.

If you like a page, only you will see the updates and information that this page feeds out. No one else will see anything that a page feeds out to you unless they follow the same page.

TIP: There is no reason to show anyone what pages you like. Why not hide all of the pages you like? That way you won’t slip up. Close friends, relatives, employers and employees don’t have to know what pages you follow, do they? Instead of tripping up at some point as you try to keep track of who can see what, why not just shut out everyone? Makes sense to us. Once you lock your page likes from everyone, you are free to be yourself. We advise you to set your Page Likes to this setting:

Photo of perfect privacy setting
Set this page to ‘Only me’ and feel free to ‘like’ any page you bloody well want to! Yay freedom!

 

We’re done. Over the last few posts we’ve tried to sort out everything about Facebook like boxes, Facebook likes and, finally, Facebook page likes. We hope things are a bit clearer now for you. Questions, comments, all are welcome. Good luck!

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

 

Controlled sharing, Facebook, Facebook Secrets, Facebook Tricks, Hide Likes from Timeline

Facebook Likes – The Ultimate Guide – Part Three

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To review, we know now that you can’t hide likes or comments on someone else’s post, no matter what kind of post or share it is. Next, lets take care of our ‘likes’, those  bits of personal information that Facebook feels are vitally important to share with your friends. They are contained in one of those little boxes under your cover photo. You can choose to show whatever boxes you want in that row that Facebook has termed ‘Favorites’. There are a total of eight possibilities for your Favorite boxes.

Not to confuse the issue even more, Facebook has two concepts of ‘Favorites’. The first has to do with which boxes you choose to show to the right of your profile photo. The ones across the top row are your ‘favorite’ boxes. The other boxes, if there are any, are available by clicking the little arrow on the far right of the row.

The second kind of favorite is used to describe your ‘favorite’ likes such as your favorite movie, your favorite TV show and so on.

The Boxes: 

The boxes to the right of your profile photo could show one of eight things. All boxes are links to whatever one of those eight things you decide to put up there. The eight things could be a link to your friend list, your photos, your likes, your notes, your subscribers (if you have chosen to allow subscribers), your maps, etc. It has occurred to us that there may be more than eight boxes available or your choices may very. Everyone’s Facebook timeline might be a little different.

The bare minimum seems to be two boxes, those being friends and photos. Even if you hide your friend list from everyone, there will be a box that shows any mutual friends that you and the viewer have. Here is a shot of the skimpiest timeline you’ll ever see:

Photo of a streamlined Facebook timeline
Only two boxes, one of mutual friends and one linked to photos.

This is the least amount of information that Facebook allows you to show on your timeline. The Like box is gone, as are the rest of them. Let’s add the Like box back and see what we can do with it:

Photo of adding boxes
Two boxes are standard, click on a + sign to add more.

 

If you click on the + sign on the top row, remember that they are termed ‘favorites’ by Facebook, you will get a different menu than if you click on one of the bottom boxes. Here’s what you see on the top:

Photo of top box menu
Everything seems to be here but ‘Likes’.

No Like box yet. Click on one of the bottom boxes to bring up this menu:

Photo of bottom row of boxes
Likes is there. Click the words Likes to add that box to the bottom row.

 

Seeing as how we only have two boxes on the top row, Facebook automatically adds your new ‘Likes’ box to the top row when you refresh the page. If you had a full row of boxes on the top, you’d be able to choose which ones you want to make your ‘favorites’. Hover your cursor (mouse) on the top right of the Like box and this menu will pop out:

Photo of swap box
‘Swap position with’ means you can arrange the favorite boxes as you wish.

 

Right now, we can only swap our Like box with Gamer Friends since we have removed all of the other box choices from our favorites.

 

Next time we’ll get deeper into sorting out our likes. This is enough information for this post. Play around with these settings until they are second nature to you.

 

Thanks for reading!