Category Archives: Privacy

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

Hiding Things on Facebook

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There are things you can hide on Facebook and things you can’t. Let’s start with the short list.

Things you can’t hide on Facebook

Comments and likes on anything that you haven’t posted. If you comment or like someone’s photo, you can’t hide it, you can only delete the comment or ‘unlike’ the photo. Same thing for a status update, a note or a page that you’ve liked. You can hide the fact that you like the page but you can’t hide your comments. Therefore:

Facebook Rule Number One: If you don’t want someone to see a like or a comment, don’t comment on or like a photo, status or comment that wasn’t posted by you.

 

Things you can hide on Facebook

You can hide virtually everything else, except what you see above. Feel free to subscribe, click like on fan pages, post photos and notes (making sure you set your privacy rules accordingly). If there are some subscriptions or fan pages that you want to hide, you can do that. We’ll show you how.

For everything you post on Facebook, there is an icon just to the right which allows you to set the rules for who can see the post. The only one that needs explanation is the Custom choice. If you click that, you can hide the post from some of your friends. Just start typing their name in the slot and select them one by one.

Here are some tips on how to hide your page likes and subscriptions:

1. Click on your profile photo on the top right to get to your timeline,

2. Click on the words Update Info.

3. Here’s what you’ll see:

The first page for updating your information.
Select the things you want to update using the drop down menu on the upper left.

4. The items in the drop down menu might be different than the ones you see here. On one of our accounts, we’ve lost the ‘likes’ completely. The one you are looking for here is probably ‘subscriptions’ or ‘likes’. Clicking on Likes brings up a page which lists all of your likes. Move your mouse over to the top right until the word Edit appears, like this:

Mouseover shown to edit "likes"
The edit button is a mouseover, it only appears when the mouse hovers over the spot where it is.

5. Click on the word Edit when it appears and this page will show up next:

List of Editable Likes
Use the icons on the right to hide your different likes.

6.  As you can see, the top list of Favorites are locked, only available to the owner of the profile. The rest are open to friends only. The current page is for your ‘favorites’, the general interest things such as movies and TV and so on. Scroll down this page to get to your actual Facebook page likes and your website/web page likes to see this:

Lower half of Facebook Likes page.
Scroll down the page to see this selection, subs will vary, of course.

7. This is where your selection of page likes will show up. Here you will see the Facebook pages you have clicked like on plus all of the websites or web pages that you’ve also liked. As you can see in the example above, all of this person’s like are locked, only the owner can see them. Any page this person clicks like on will be hidden from everyone. Remember that.

Tip: Before you go around clicking like on questionable pages, click like on a generic page. Once you’ve done that, head over to the page above and hide that like from everyone, or just from some/one of your friends. Anything you like after that will be hidden, according to your current settings.

Finally, here is the key to hiding what pages you like, whether they be Facebook pages or web sites or pages beyond Facebook:

Use this menu to select who can see your likes on Facebook.
Use this menu to select who can see your likes on Facebook.

It is that little menu at the top. Use it wisely and you’ll be able to safely click like on anything BUT posts or shares by other people.
Facebook is fun but sometimes you like to keep some of your activities hidden from your friends. We hope this little guide helps you out.

Thanks for reading!

 

 

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!

 

 

 

Privacy, Security

My View on Internet Freedom

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Remember the Berlin Wall? It was one of the last relics of the Cold War. Built in 1961, it was a symbol of backward thinking politicians, persecution and the loss of personal freedom until it was torn down in 1989. You might also remember Ronald Reagan’s famous line, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” How dramatic that line was! It’s still used in stirring and patriotic speeches about God Bless America and freedom. Unfortunately, the western world is far less free than it was in 1989.

This week, Canada will enact legislation that will allow police and governments to spy on its citizens without a warrant of any kind. The legislation will force ISPs to provide vast amounts of information without any kind of judicial control. Canadians, showing their natural good humour (we spell it with the ‘u’), reacted to this legislation by using Twitter to make fun of the government minister who promoted the bill. We tweeted everything we were doing, everything we were thinking and everything that our cats and dogs were doing. Providing a mass of unrelated information  just might be a way to hide your tracks if you are up to something sinister. Unfortunately, this would also hide real criminals and terrorists from being identified.

Hasan Elahi used much the same kind of tactic when he was questioned by the FBI for six months in 2009. Here’s a description of what he did: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/opinion/sunday/giving-the-fbi-what-it-wants.html?pagewanted=all

Hasan’s website is here: http://www.elahi.umd.edu/track/  and you can track him virtually everywhere in the world. He’s taken privacy to a whole other level. By making himself completely open in all of his activities, he has invented a way to, perhaps, cloak his actions in behind a wall of transparency. Here he is on Youtube (Ted TV):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAdwurHhv-I

explaining what happened and how he handled the situation.

Americans have already lost their freedoms. You might not know it but you have. The NSA, the FBI, the CIA and even the EOP (look it up) are already spying on you. Through the use of expert scaremongering, successive presidents and legislators have teamed up to deny your constitutional rights. The Occupy riots have proven that even the most basic right of freedom of assembly, is long gone.

Canadians are by nature quite peaceful. This bill, hopefully, will stir us into action to defeat the government that introduced and supported it. Our political system is different from the American system. If we get ticked off with the current party in power, it’s not unusual for us to completely trash them in the next election. We’re not a two party country up here and we don’t vote along team lines. It’s a little bit harder for Americans to get rid of a party that threatens to limit their freedom but it’s still possible. As the Arab Spring might* have shown us, change is possible if we work collectively to promote it. Isn’t it curious that the communist principle of a collective voice against oppression seems to be the ideal tool in our post-capitalist society.

Thanks for reading. I’d love to see a few comments on this post.

*I say ‘might’ simply because neither Egypt or Libya seems to have succeeded in enacting the ideals that they fought for. In the power vacuum that was created after the ouster of the old leaders, it seems that the military in both countries has taken over. Just as church and state should be separate, there is no place  in the world for a military state.

 

 

Privacy, Security, TOR

Online Privacy Part 2 : TOR

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What is TOR? Here is the description from the TOR website:

“Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis.”

What this means is that once you are using the TOR browser, your surfing habits are hidden from prying eyes. TOR also hides your location from the rest of the world. Here is how TOR describes what it does:

“Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. Tor works with many of your existing applications, including web browsers, instant messaging clients, remote login, and other applications based on the TCP protocol.”

If you’ve watched any recent cop show on TV, you’ll know that tracing a criminal can be easy, depending on the time limit in the plot. As far back as Three Days of the Condor (Six Days in the novel), smart operatives defeated tracking software simply by bouncing their source signal from place to place, either in a telephone exchange as Robert Redford did in Condor or through various servers around the world as Lisbeth Salander did in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Once you start using TOR, your surfing might slow down a bit but you will be as anonymous as you can get on the Internet.  Take a journey with me as I begin to discover TOR’s capabilities. I’ll also try to test it’s effectiveness at hiding my IP address in several places around the world. I should say now that TOR is free. There are other ways to hide your IP address from prying eyes but every one that I can think of involves spending some bucks. I’m all for free, aren’t you?

Start by reading the documentation here: https://www.torproject.org/docs/documentation.html.en   Start to discover on your own what TOR is about, download everything and pop back for more updates on Monday. (I’m donating blood tomorrow so I’ll be tied up most of the day.)

Thanks for reading!

Privacy, Security, Spam, WordPress

Check Your User Settings in Worpress

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This morning I received an email from this site telling me that someone had registered as a user. Needless to say I was surprised. I wasn’t quite sure what damage a new user could do to my site but I logged in, deleted him and changed my settings. When WordPress asked me to confirm the deletion, it also asked me if I wanted to delete any links that the new user had put up here. I said yes, of course, but that made me think about my settings on my other sites. The default WordPress settings make it very easy for anyone to subscribe to your site AND to post links. Here’s how you can protect your site before this happens to you.

Head over to Settings, second last link on the left side of your Dashboard window. Once you are there, you should be on the General Settings page but make sure that this is where you are.

Halfway down you’ll see ‘Membership’ with a box that is, probably, checked. If it is checked then ‘Anyone can register’ which isn’t what you want. You want to un-check that box to prevent people from adding themselves as users. You can still add users but you have to be logged in as admin in order to do that.

The second thing you want to do, now that we are on this subject, is to limit comments on your posts. Yes, you want comments but you don’t want spam. There are two ways to prevent this. The first is to go to Settings then to Discussion Settings. What you are looking for there is ‘Email me whenever’ and ‘Before a comment appears’. In the second one, make sure that the box is checked beside ‘An administrator must always approve the comment’. Then, in the section above, make sure that you get an email when someone makes a comment and when one is held for approval.

If you have your WordPress installation set up this way, you won’t get surprised by someone adding themselves to your user list AND you won’t get spam comments showing up unannounced, either. Sure, you will get spam but you can check the comments and delete them. How can you prevent spam completely? You can’t. But you can add a plugin that will put check all comments and automatically put the ones that are spam into the proper folder. Here’s how.

Akismet is a standard plugin that you get with WordPress. To get it working, you need to activate it. To activate Akismet, you have to register and then get what they call an ‘API Key’. Don’t worry, it’s free. All of the links are there on your WordPress Plugins page. The key is the only thing you need before Akismet roots out spam for you. It won’t send an email but it will hold all the comments that it thinks are spam, and it is never wrong, until you show up to delete them.

There are other ways to secure your WordPress installation, these are only two. WordPress is probably the most documented bit of brilliance on the ‘net. Keep learning and keep safe, people.

Thanks for reading!