We’ve been confronted by a problem this week, a problem that we could duplicate but not solve. One of our readers commented that she was unable to unhide her June like box on Facebook. To get to the root of this problem, we deleted the June box in one of our profiles on Facebook. Lo and behold it’s gone, forever it seems. If we find a way to get it back, you’ll be the first to know. Here’s how we got rid of the box:
1. Head to your timeline and find the box you want to delete. In this case, our June Like box is the target.
This was our June Like box before we deleted it. No edit button shows at this point.
2. Hover your cursor (mouse) over the top right corner of the box to bring up the edit button giving you a choice of editing or removing the box:
Hovering your cursor over the top right corner brings up this Edit button.
3. Click on the icon to bring this menu up:
The choices for this box are to simply hide it from the timeline.
4. You would think that if you can hide the box from the timeline, you’d be able to unhide it, right? Well, we can’t. We also hid another box and lost it too. If you don’t refresh your page, you can undo the hide but once you refresh the page, it’s gone forever…we think.
It’s gone! We’re looking for it. If we find it, we’ll let you know.
5. Once we refreshed the page, not only were the two likes gone, the whole damn box was gone!
Facebook is chock full of mysteries and confusion sometimes, isn’t it? But it’s fun to try and unravel these mysteries. We often wonder if the people who created this mess will ever be able to simplify it or, perhaps, they don’t want to. The more confusing the interface is, the less chance that someone will be able to dodge Facebook’s ads and their various invasions of our privacy. The less people hide, the more money Facebook makes, right? You might want to think about that before you dive into it.
If you’ve lost your like box on your Facebook timeline, here’s how to get it back:
1. Head over to your profile and look for the line of boxes under the banner that has your profile photo, your name and the words Update Info and Activity Log. Look for the little square that has a down arrow and, probably, a number. It looks like this:
This box has the number 6 in it. Click on the down arrow.
2. Once you click on the down arrow, this is what you’ll see:
There are 11 boxes shown, meaning that 6 were hidden before and two boxes have nothing in them.
3. What you’re looking for is the box with the add or plus sign on the top right. Click the plus sign to see this:
Since this person already has a like box, the thumbs up icon is not shown here but will be if your Like box is missing.
4. This person can add three things to the box list, all three are apps. If this person had hidden the Like box in the past, there would be an icon like the one just to the left of this drop-down menu. Just click that icon and you’ll have your Like box back again.
5. If you have a box that you want to hide, hover over the right corner of the box with your cursor (mouse) and a little pen icon, meaning that you can edit the settings, shows up. Click that and you’ll see this menu:
This is where you can change the position of a box or remove it from your favorites.
6. With this menu, you can swap position with another box to have it shown on your timeline without your visitors having to click on the down arrow. Alternatively, you can simply hide the box completely.
We’ve been writing about Facebook privacy for quite a while now. There seem to be an incredible array of privacy settings, right? If you’d like to do your own experiments, and we suggest that you should, here’s what to do: Set up a second Facebook profile.
1. Instead of logging into Facebook, apply for a new account. Fill in your details on the page that comes up when you log out of your current account or simply go to Facebook.com in another browser. You could use your real identity, such as your second name and the same last name, or a fake one, it won’t matter to Facebook, even though their terms say you have to be a ‘real person’. You must use a real email address but that’s easy, sign up for a new hotmail or gmail account and you’re off.
2. Add yourself as a friend. That’s your first step. Forget about photos or personal details for now. Add your other account as a friend (in a separate browser), and get to work. Keeping both profiles open in separate browsers will show you instantly how changing the settings on your new profile affects what updates you send out to your other, original profile.
3. On the new account, go around liking things, posting crazy pics with different privacy settings and so on. On your normal account, check to see what is shown from your alter ego’s activities. What you’re looking for, obviously, is how you can hide what your fake account does from your real account. If your fake account can hide things, then your real account can hide things as well.
4. Make a note of anything you do. We find ourselves lost in the thick of Facebook privacy pages sometimes and, quite frankly, we forget how we got there. Part of this is deliberate. We have to describe how to get to a certain page to our readers so it has to be kind of second nature to us. Getting lost lets us experiment with our reader’s experience. If we explain something and we get lost, then sure as shootin’ our readers will too.
5. You can use the second account to subscribe to pages and websites that you wouldn’t normally subscribe to, knowing that your privacy is guaranteed. For some of you who have very eclectic tastes, this might be the answer to the whole Facebook privacy problem. Instead of trying to decipher Facebook’s arcane privacy settings, simply start a new account and get on with exploring the alternate lifestyle you want to hide from your family and/or your friends.
6. Another benefit of a new account comes with the different Facebook games you play. If you need shots of energy in Mafia Wars, send them from your new account. There are quite a few games that require neighbors in order to advance. Adding yourself as a neighbor opens up more doors in games such as Farmville or Hidden Chronicles.
Adding a new Facebook account and experimenting with it is simple, free and probably takes a lot less time than trying to remember which setting is which, at least as far as privacy is concerned. It also takes less time than reading posts such as we have here on Computers Made Simple but we hope you still come back to visit us now and then.
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:
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:
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
Recognize anyone? No? Neither do we.
2. This is from Girl’s Life magazine.
Only five but, again, these are strangers...young strangers.
3. This is from Stickam.com, a very popular teen webcam chat site.
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?
“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.”
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:
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.
a little bit of hi-tech, a little bit of common sense and a lot of fun
