How to Protect Your Privacy on Facebook

Well Facebook had made another change!  This time they "simplified" their privacy settings and in doing so, caused confusion and a new round of ill informed posts.  One that is going viral right now talks about having your friends do things to make sure the world doesn't see what you wrote.  While it isn't entirely false, following the guidelines will NOT ensure your privacy, but limit what YOU can see, thus providing a false sense of privacy.

The Snopes.com article about this is here, but they don't provide the details you need to keep yourself private. I'll go through the settings in a bit of detail, but here's the privacy picture in a nutshell. 

I can't begin to tell you how many people have lost friends, been arrested, lost jobs, college scholarships, or their jobs because the THOUGHT their post was private.
IF YOU DON'T WANT FRIENDS OF FRIENDS OR THE PUBLIC TO SEE WHAT YOU ARE DOING, DON'T DO ANYTHING ON FACEBOOK BUT READ!

Now let's take a look at what you need to do to theoretically limit your activities to your friends.  I say theoretically, because it is never as simple as it seems and there are way that your posts could be seen, especially if you are tagged on a photo and then comment, but I digress...

Now you can check and change your settings!

Below, you can see four of the five setting you should change based on you desired level of privacy.  I'll address number 2 in more detail in below.

 So far, the simplified settings are simple, but here's where it can get confusing. Clicking on "Review all your posts and things will you're tagged in" will show all your activities and, to some extent, who can see them.

 

When you click on it, you will be able to scroll through all your activities.  I've chosen three below to help you understand what this means and what you have to do to protect your privacy. By no means, is this a comprehensive explanation!

 

1) First, you see I commented on Jimmy's post.  There is no icon, before the pencil icon.  Because there is no icon there, I know that the people who see it are determined by Jimmy's privacy settings.  If he makes public posts, the world can see it.  

2) The pencil icon indicates that your settings allow this to show up on your wall.  If you don't want it on your wall, you can go to your wall and Hide it.  However, it will still be on Jimmy's page where you placed the comment.

3) The globe shows that the world can see that I "liked" Sandy's status post.  Sandy is a friend of mine who is technically sharp, has chosen to make her posts public, but lives my my motto, "Never post anything online you don't want to read in the NY Times tomorrow morning."

4) The silhouette indicates that only my friends can see this post, because I have chosen to be more private than Sandy.

So there you have it in a nutshell.  As I said, this is by no means all there is to know about privacy settings on Facebook.  Even if you NEVER post, your privacy isn't secure.  You can be tagged on photos and friends who are careless about their privacy may share things about you that you wouldn't want shared.  Not even quitting Facebook can prevent that sort of thing.

The best thing you can do is to follow the idea of not posting anything you don't want to be public and to help educate your friends.

Be safe!

Time to Change Our Focus

First it was predators, then it was cyberbullying, and now it is sexting. The news media is treating us to the fear dujour. They generate reactions that are at best, narrow in focus. It's time to end this kind of narrow focus, take a step back and look at the problem differently.

When you come right down to it, the problems we are seeing stem from kids being kids in an environment that has a lack of adult oversight and guidance. When we do try to provide guidance, they often fail to respond, because they more than know we do, or at least they think they do.

WiredSafety has always know that kids will listen to kids before they will listen to adults and that they will listen to adults if we give them the credit and respect they deserve. That's why long ago, Parry Aftab established Teenangels, groups of teens who are trained by WiredSafety and law enforcement to become experts in cybersafety. We learn from them, they learn from us, and they train others in online citizenship.

The idea of online citizenship is what it is all about. There are many different kinds of online abuse, but pretty much all of them can be prevented if we create good cybercitizens.

MTV, WiredSafety, and others have been working together to empower youth to take positive action, to take ownership for their personal behavior, and be part of the solution rather than the problem. Teens will be working with teens to stay on the right side of that thin line between appropriate and in appropriate behavior at http://www.athinline.org .

Part of that effort is offering teens an opportunity to win $10,000 by coming up with innovative digital ways of stopping online abuse, as well as offering an opportunity to work with MTV and a $75,000 budget to make their idea a reality.

Another part is giving teens a voice and a platform to talk to other teens as done on the site and on Facebook by teens such as Casi. http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=192141552130

Of course, if you are reading this from school you can't visit the Facebook link. So here is the blog entry in two screen shots. Just click on each small image to expand.