Facebook Privacy Settings: how to check your exposure
Sunday, April 25, 2010 at 8:43AM After all the recent brouhaha about Facebook's privacy issues I decided to double-check my settings.
Background: Facebook recently changed the way people's information is made available beyond their circle of friends and then they added a new data-sharing feature which is turned on by default. As I keep up with these things I reckoned I had sorted my settings out already but to my horror they had added further "functionality" that made all of my content pretty much wide open again.
Of course Facebook is a useful service in so many ways but let's not forget they have to make money and they aren't charging you for your account. So they're going to sell, and sell hard, to advertisers to generate this income - and what have they got to sell? Your data, and that's it. Don't underestimate how much of it they need to sell to justify their vast valuation, rumoured at around $11.5 billion. With Facebook your data is intrinsically NOT SAFE unless you really keep tabs on it.
So what to do: go to this Facebook settings page for your profile and go into the options highlighted here:
There are two things to be aware of -
1. What info from your profile can be spread about by friends under the heading "What your friends can share about you". This can be a backdoor route for others to expose you inadvertently.
2. Also their new "instant personalization" initiative which essentially allows certain external websites to automatically 'mine' your profile, your updates etc for info which helps them "personalize" their offerings to you. In essence this means that Facebook has simply handed over all your most private information to a third party. That they have invoked this with people opted-in by default is very sneaky.
(At the time of writing the only sites that work on this feature are the newly announced docs.com, Yelp and Pandora.)
Finally, it might be worth reviewing the most central settings pane as well, under "What you share", as this is of course the first line of defence.
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