Tool Kit
Staying Private on the New Facebook
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
Published: February 6, 2013 144 Comments
Facebook
is a personal vault that can contain photos of your firstborn, plans to
bring down your government and, occasionally, a record of your
indiscretions.
Minh Uong/The New York Times
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What is your strategy for protecting your privacy on Facebook?
It can be scoured by police officers, partners and would-be employers.
It can be mined by marketers to show tailored advertisements.
And now, with Facebook’s newfangled search tool, it can allow strangers,
along with “friends” on Facebook, to discover who you are, what you
like and where you go.
Facebook insists it is up to you to decide how much you want others to
see. And that is true, to some extent. But you cannot entirely opt out
of Facebook searches. Facebook, however, does let you fine-tune who can
see your “likes” and pictures, and, to a lesser extent, how much of
yourself to expose to marketers.
The latest of its frequent changes to the site’s privacy settings was
made in December. Facebook is nudging each of its billion subscribers to
review them.
The nudge could not have been more timely, said Sarah Downey, a lawyer with the Boston company Abine,
which markets tools to help users control their visibility online. “It
is more important than ever to lock down your Facebook privacy settings
now that everything you post will be even easier to find,” she said.
That is to say, your settings will determine, to a large extent, who can
find you when they search for women who buy dresses for toddlers or,
more unsettling, women who jog a particular secluded trail.
What can you do? Ask yourself four simple questions.
QUESTION 1 How would you like to be found?
Go to “who can see my stuff” on the upper right side of your Facebook
page. Click on “see more settings.” By default, search engines can link
to your timeline. You can turn that off if you wish.
Go to “activity log.” Here you can review all your posts, pictures,
“likes” and status updates. If you are concerned about who can see what,
look at the original privacy setting of the original post.
In my case, I had been tagged eating a bowl of ricotta with my fingers
at midnight near Arezzo. My friend who posted the picture enabled it to
be seen by anyone, which means that it would show up in a stranger’s
search for, I don’t know, people who eat ricotta with their fingers at
midnight. I am tagged in other photos that are visible only to friends
of the person who posted them.
The point is, you want to look carefully at what the original settings
are for those photos and “likes,” and decide whether you would like to
be associated with them.
“I don’t get this Facebook thing either,” said one woman whose friend
request I had accepted in January 2008. “But everyone in our generation
seems to be on it.”
If you are concerned about things that might embarrass or endanger you
on Facebook — Syrians who endorse the opposition may not want to be
discovered by government apparatchiks — comb through your timeline and
get rid of them. The only way to ensure that a post or photo is not
discovered is to “unlike” or “delete” it.
Make yourself a pot of tea. This may take a while. The nostalgia may just be amusing.
QUESTION 2 What do you want the world to know about you?
Go to your profile page and click “About me.” Decide if you would like
your gender, or the name of your spouse, to be visible on your timeline.
Think about whether you want your birthday to be seen on your timeline.
Your date of birth is an important piece of personal information for
hackers to exploit.
A tool created a couple of weeks ago by a team of college students
offers to look for certain words and phrases that could embarrass other
college students as they apply for internships and jobs. It is called Simplewash,
formerly Facewash, and it looks for profanity, references to drugs and
other faux pas that you do not necessarily want, say, a law school
admissions officer to see.
Socioclean is another application that scours your Facebook posts. It is selling its service to college campuses to offer to students.
QUESTION 3 Do you mind being tracked by advertisers?
Facebook has eyes across the Web; one study
found that its so-called widget — the innocuous blue letter “f” — is
integrated into 20 percent of the 10,000 most popular Web sites. If that
is annoying, several tools can help you block trackers. Abine, DisconnectMe and Ghostery
offer browser extensions. Once installed on your Web browser, these
extensions will tell you how many trackers they have blocked.
Facebook also has a mechanism to show you ads based on the Web sites you
have visited. It works with third-party companies to place cookies on
my computer when, for instance, I visit an e-commerce site. That brand
knows that I might be looking at girls’ dresses. It can ask Facebook to
show me an ad for girls’ dresses when I log in to Facebook. You can
control this. Hover over the “X” next to the ad and choose from the
drop-down menu: “Hide this ad,” you could say. Or hide all ads from this
brand. Facebook does not serve the ads itself, so to opt out of certain
kinds of targeted ads, you must go to the third party that Facebook
works with to show ads based on the Web sites you have browsed.
QUESTION 4 Whom do you want to befriend?
Now is the time to review whom you count among your Facebook friends.
Your boss? Do you really want her to see pictures of you in Las Vegas?
And the woman you met in Lamaze class: do you want the apps she has
installed to know who you are?
Privacyfix.com, a browser
extension, shows you how to keep your friends’ Facebook applications
from sucking you into their orbit. It is preparing to introduce a tool
to control what it calls your “exposure” to the Facebook search engine.
Secure.me offers a similar
feature. Depending on your privacy settings, that photo-sharing app that
your Lamaze compatriot just installed could, in one click, know who you
are and have access to all the photos that you thought you were sharing
with “friends.”
One of Facebook’s cleverest heists is the word “friend.” It makes you
think all your Facebook contacts are really your “friends.” They may not
be.
A version of this article appeared in print on February 7, 2013, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Staying Private on the New Facebook.
My personal solution is to spend only about 3 hours yearly on Facebook and only when directed then by friends and relatives who might want to share pictures and other things with me in this way. I try to never use Facebook because I think if you are over 15 years of age it can prevent you ever getting a job, prevent you ever getting into college, and possibly prevent you from ever owning a business. So, I look upon Facebook as a way many people use to keep people destitute financially while people are having fun communicating with each other. However, I also see it as a fact of life that many or most people don't fully share my concerns.
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