If you have an account on Facebook, sometime in the last day you were probably faced with a screen that asked you to reset your privacy settings. According to Facebook the reasoning behind this is simplification:
…many users have expressed that the current set of privacy choices are confusing or overwhelming. In response, the Privacy Settings page has been completely redesigned with a goal of making the controls easy, intuitive and accessible.
Based on the reaction I’ve seen so far, simple must mean something entirely different to the team behind Facebook than it does to the rest of us.
When you are presented with the initial privacy screen, you’re given two options: allow “Everyone” to see your content, or retain your old privacy settings. Facebook says they “recommend” that you switch to “Everyone”, but they don’t tell you what that means.
It means that everyone with a Facebook account will see your content. Your profile information, your status updates, your links, your photos… not just friends or friends of friends.
Don’t choose “Everyone” unless that’s what you really want. Instead stick with your old settings.
Ok, done, right? Nope. Go into your Privacy settings and make sure they’re set the way you want them. If you’ve created Friend Lists with different permissions, click on Custom and double check.
There’s another important change that Facebook glosses over. Previously you could hide all your information, but now there are some parts of your profile that are visible to “Everyone” with no option to customize.
- Your image
- Your sex
- Your friends
- Pages you’ve fanned
I’ve already heard from two people who are confronted with privacy issues that relate to this information. One doesn’t want her image public for personal reasons, another is concerned about certain friends on his list seeing each other- people he has good reason to keep apart.
Unfortunately the only work-arounds are of the sledge-hammer variety:
You can remove your image entirely, or change it to something other than your face, which hardly seems reasonable.
You can hide your friends list from your profile by going to your profile page and clicking the little pen (edit icon) in the Friends box on the left and unclicking the “show my friends on my profile” box. Unfortunately this means no one can see your friends list.
You can hide your sex from your profile by going to your profile page > info tab > click “edit information” and uncheck “show my sex in my profile”.
As far as I can tell there’s no way to hide the Pages you’ve fanned. So if you don’t want your employer to know how much you love Lindsay Lohan, your only option is to unfan that page.
A good write up and explanation can be found at Facebook’s New Privacy Changes: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
You can also take a look through Facebook’s own Privacy Help Page.
{ 1 comment }
