Undeniably the Internets’ biggest social networking site, Facebook has been undergoing many changes to its interface, direction, and most recently, their privacy policy. At Facebook’s f8 conference earlier this month, they announced many privacy policy changes that will have a huge effect on how users, pages and third party developers interact. Although many of these changes will not directly harm the user, there are a few privacy issues that are raised.
Check out a few of the changes to how Facebook will use your information and how you can keep this info safe:
“Instant Personalization”
Among many of the announcements, Facebook presented an “Instant Personalization Option”. With the default Facebook privacy settings, Instant Personalization will allow other Facebook partner sites such as Pandora to pull automatically pull the user’s public Facebook Information such as your name, gender, artists liked and other public information whenever you visit their website. Although this may not seem like such a bad thing, remember that Facebook is basically sharing your personal information, birthdays, address etc. with other website that have no need for this information. Who knows which sites in the future will have immediate access to your personal information.
To change this setting:
Go to: Account Settings>>Privacy Settings>>Applications and Websites>>Instant
Personalization>>Edit Settings>>Uncheck
“Friends Sharing”
Not only can your public information be unknowingly shared by visiting other websites, now your friends can also leak your information. Facebook’s new changes now also allow your friends to “share” your public information whenever they use a Facebook pp or program that affects friends. So now when your friends sends you a greeting card or invites your to play Farmville, the app is allowed to then access your public information in order to pull out various pieces of information in order to make the sharing experience more personalized.
But considering an average user’s number of friends, who knows how many friends have given out your information to the numerous apps and games Facebook offers.
To change this setting:
Go to: Account Settings>>Privacy Settings>>Applications and Websites>>What Your Friends Can Share About You>> Edit Settings
“More Tips”
1. On Facebook, “liking” a celebrity, company, show, or artist is a very common thing for users, but because of the new privacy changes, it may be smart to audit your likes. If you would not want the public knowing particular things you like, go to: Account>>Edit Friends>>Pages and check off various “likes” you wouldn’t want to make public.
2. Another tip users might take to protect their privacy would be to audit some of their third-party applications.
Access the personalization settings and uncheck some of the third-party applications such as Pandora, Docs, and Yelp that you would not like accessing your public information.
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