At some point last year, Facebook users who hadn’t changed their search privacy settings lost the ability to change them at all. As of yesterday, October 10, 2013, all Facebook users lost that privacy feature. Why? Because Facebook arbitrarily changes these settings to benefit themselves, not their users. Here is what they have to say about it:
Read over Facebook’s rather lame reasoning for this action. What’s the next thing that Facebook will change? We suspect that, unless you have set your post/status/photo settings to anything other than ‘everyone’, everything you post on Facebook will be just that, open to everyone. Every photo, every comment, every status update will be wide open to both people you know and millions upon millions of people you don’t. Change your settings now before you lose them completely.
On the page linked above, you should read the section about limiting your past posts. Here’s a graphic that they use:
This is a way to set all of your past posts to Friends Only or Friends of Friends, depending on your preferences.
When you are making a new post, whether it be a status update, a photo/album or something that you’re sharing, be sure to set the privacy level that you feel secure with. Here’s a graphic about how to do that:
Adjust these setting now before you lose the ability to change them at all.
We’ve just read that Twitter is now more popular among teens than Facebook is. Teens, the original audience for Facebook, seem to have moved on, leaving Facebook to their parents and grandparents. You can bet that Facebook will ramp up their privacy changes in the near future to eliminate that privacy altogether. Read through our posts and figure out how to change your settings to match your own level of security. It looks as if those who don’t use the settings, lose them completely. Don’t let this happen to you.
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We’re still getting comments about Facebook and its arcane and obscure privacy settings. Not only are they as described, they are also well hidden. Here’s a short set of tips for you:
Things you can’t hide:
Cover photos are all public, all the time.
Profile thumbnails are all public, all the time.
Mobile albums, the ones you upload from your mobile device, seem to default to ‘public’. You have to change the setting to something else if you don’t want these pics to be wide open to the world.
Mutual friends can’t be hidden. You can hide your complete friend list but NOT mutual friends.
While you can’t hide your ‘About’ section, you can hide virtually all of the details in it.
Summation: Three sections can’t be hidden. These are Mutual Friends, Cover Photos and Profile Photo thumbnails.
Actions you can’t hide:
Photo likes and comments cannot be hidden. If you like Jim or Jane’s photo, everyone that can see the photo will know it. Ditto for comments. There is no way around this. Like something that isn’t under your control and everyone who can see that ‘something’ will see your like or your comment.
The act of liking a page. While you can hide the fact that you like a page, either by hiding the whole section or by quickly removing the action from your activity log, the initial like might show up somewhere. If the act of liking a page can get you into trouble, don’t like it. Read the next tip.
TIP: Facebook now tells you that “If you hide a section, individual stories can still appear on your Timeline, in News Feed and elsewhere on Facebook.” Change the word ‘section’ to just about anything that you do or share on Facebook and you’ll be well on your way to seeing that virtually nothing on Facebook is private. Even if it is private to your friends and the world at large, it is not private to employees of Facebook. OK?
Groups:
If joining or starting a group will cause you problems, don’t do it. Group settings are up to the group admin and can be changed at any time. If being in a group threatens your privacy or home life, don’t join it.
The Answer to Facebook’s (Anti)-Privacy Settings:
Start a fresh, anonymous profile, one that doesn’t reveal anything about the real you, and use it to enjoy everything you can’t hide on your real profile. Keep the new profile open in another browser and you can blithely click like or comment or post anything you want. You can relax and be your real self without harming anyone else. Go for it!
Facebook changes frequently. Keep up with these changes by Liking our Facebook page. Here’s the link: Computers Made Simple on Facebook
We’ve covered a lot this week, haven’t we? The final step is outlining what you can control and what you can’t. Before we begin, take a look at this:
It looks like anything can be seen by anyone, right?
Take this as a warning. As far as actions go, even if you remove something from your timeline, it still might be seen elsewhere on Facebook. Let’s just say that Facebook’s privacy control is full of holes. Therefore, expect the worst. If you feel that something you’re about to do is risky, don’t do it.
Things you can control completely, more or less:
1. Photos you post yourself that are NOT profile pic thumbnails or timeline cover photos. Every other photo can be limited to you or to some friends or to everyone on Facebook. Profile pic thumbnails and timeline covers are PUBLIC. Anyone who you have not blocked can see them.
2. Videos that you post. You can set the privacy for any video when you post it or after the fact. The key word is POST. If you share something, you cannot control who sees it.
3. Notes that you post. Again, you can set the privacy when you post the note or afterwards.
4. Status updates. The last thing you can control, more or less completely, are your status updates.
5. Likes/Interests. By likes we mean pages that you like, musicians, movies, books that you like, etc. You can hide some or all of them. We’ve written many posts on this explaining how to do it, how to get them back and so on. Use the search box on any page to bring up the instructional posts on this topic.
Get used to using this box when you are posting anything on Facebook:
Use this box for everything you post on Facebook.
Things you post that you cannot control using privacy settings:
1. Timeline cover photos. These photos, the big image behind your profile pic, are PUBLIC. Anyone who can see your profile, even if you’ve hidden everything else, can still see this picture. There is nothing you can do about it so be careful what you post here.
2. Profile thumbnail pics. Your profile photo can be controlled via the privacy dialogue pictured above, either when you post it or afterwards. The thumbnail, the smaller photo that everyone sees, is PUBLIC. Remember that. Use our guide to protect your profile photo thumbnail: Profile Photo Trick
3. Likes and comments on things that someone else posted. This is the most confusing part of Facebook, right? Everyone seems to have a problem with this. If you didn’t post it, it’s out of your control. If you comment, like or share something that someone else posted, everything is controlled by the original poster’s privacy settings. You cannot hide that fact that you like someone’s photo. They will know it, their friends will know it, your friends will know it….well, you get the point. Once you step out of the relative safety zone of your own posts, you’re lost in the void that is Facebook. Be careful.
4. Mutual friends. While you can hide your full list of friends from your other friends, you cannot hide any mutual friends.
5. Some photos. Read 1 and 2 again, just to be sure.
6. The ‘About’ you box on your Facebook profile. You can hide some things about yourself, not everything. We’ve done post on this in the past but we’ll do another update soon. Read this post, Facebook – Get your Likes Back , to figure out how to hide or unhide your likes/interests.
Here’s something you should see, brought to you by Facebook:
Everything looks good until you read the very last line at the bottom.
See the greyed out sections at the top? You can’t hide those sections, at least not everything in them. Check or uncheck the other sections, according to your preferences. After you do that, read the line at the bottom. We’ve copied it here, just in case you miss it:
“If you hide a section, individual stories can still appear on your Timeline, in News Feed and elsewhere on Facebook”.
In other words, you can’t really hide very much of your activity on Facebook. You should look at your actions on Facebook in two different streams; things that you post and things that you do. As we’ve said above, you can hide most of the things you post. As far as the things that you do (liking something, commenting on something, sharing something), you cannot hide any part of it. Even if you think you can, Facebook tells you that it might appear ‘elsewhere on Facebook’.
Wow, it’s been a long week for us. Lots of research and some wordy but, hopefully, informative articles too. Please comment, ask questions, yell, scream or just say hi in the comment box at the bottom. We’re here to help, don’t forget that.
Thanks for reading!
a little bit of hi-tech, a little bit of common sense and a lot of fun
