With the firestorm of criticism in the tech world over the privacy changes on facebook this week I thought I would put up a quick little guide for those not aware of how to fix the privacy issue.
Listening to TWiT this week, there was a great discussion of the effect and implications of these new privacy settings. An example of the effects of this change is that the founder of facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, had all his personal photos on facebook shared with the public.
Last week facebook prompted everyone to update their privacy settings with their ‘handy’ little form. The problem is, if you are one of the many people who never manually set their privacy settings then all your activity on facebook will be turned public if you just click through the form without changing anything.
Go to your privacy settings here.
Go through each section of the privacy page to check and make sure your settings are what you want them to be.
One point of emphasis is that the applications on facebook have an level of access to your information that is staggering. The base privacy settings do not apply to your applications at all. The scarier part of this situation is that even if you do not have any applications on your profile, companies can get your information from your friends’ applications!
I found out this information listening to TWiT yesterday when they talked about the ACLU app on facebook, ‘What Do Quizzes Really Know About You?‘. It is a bit heavy-handed but gets the point across.
While I am not happy with the latest developments from facebook, I am somewhat stuck on facebook because all my friends/family are on there. So I am removing all applications from my account and am blocking all my data from being shared with my friends’ applications. I’d rather not be inundated with marketing from companies that I had no idea were getting my information.
Till Next Time
