Facebook May Have Made Your Profile Public, Lock It Down
3 min read
Facebook has once again gone and made your Facebook profile WIDE OPEN to the world to see. I take great care to keep my Facebook posts limited to my FRIENDS, however as I was looking at the new Graph Stalker Search feature I did a View As Public function and realized that my profile was wide open. What the Heck!?!?! Unacceptable!
Facebook’s practice of not only introducing new features with little or no option to use it or not, they take your privacy settings and modify them and make what you had private, public. This is beyond ethically questionable practices. B.S. if you want my opinion of it. So I have spent the evening working on re-privitizing my profile and gathering the steps to post this for your use.
I highly recommend you doing this yourself then telling everyone you know about this. Because the next drunken photo you post that you think is private to your friends may on fact be visible to the entire world. Think twice before you vent about your boss or co-workers until you verify this.
Take ownership of your privacy, don’t rely on Facebook to have your privacy in their best interest.
The first thing you need to do is click on the little padlock in the upper right hand corner of your Facebook pages. You will see a menu like the one pictured above. The first thing you need to do is click on the 4th item, What do other people see on my timeline? View As. This will show you what the viewing public sees on your profile, if you see that drunken picture or slandering comments about your boss then you need to lock it down.
The first option Who can see my future posts? This is a default setting that any posts you many from here on out are visible by what group. I recommend you set this to friends, if this is Public then anyone, friends or not, will be able to see them.
The rest of the options are similar settings as before to block specific people or groups from contacting you. But, Facebook’s dirty tricks need to be cleaned up. If you look at the Activity Log you will see all your past posts and anyone that has a little Globe is wide open to the world. But you may have thousands of posts with that and you can’t possibly set each one to Friends. Here’s how to fix that for all past posts in one shot. Once you do this however, there is no going back.
Click on the little gear in the upper right hand corner of a Facebook page.
Select Privacy Settings.
The third option is Limit the audience… click the Limit Past Posts link and then click the button to Limit Past Posts. This will take all your past posts and set them so only your friends can see them. Do this now!
To confirm, go back to the first menu as posted above and do the View As… and re-check how your profile looks to the public now, you should see the bare minimum.
Facebook wants the almighty advertising dollar from your data but your posts on Facebook are no longer about exclusivity, socializing, or friends. Facebook wants no secrets, groups, cliques, circles or anything that would lock someone else out of your posts. The things people post can be destructive and Facebook has just opened the doors to lots of people being humiliated, fired, or worse. This is bad business from Facebook and against their core foundation on why they came to be.
Think about how many users, that are not tech savvy, where their profiles are now wide open for the advertising bots to read to better target ads for them. But, their personal photos, thoughts, and social commentary now open to the world for all to see… and they don’t even know it.
Take charge of your privacy, no one else cares.
End of Line.
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Binary Blogger
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Binary Blogger has spent 20 years in the Information Security space currently providing security solutions and evangelism to clients. From early web application programming, system administration, senior management to enterprise consulting I provide practical security analysis and solutions to help companies and individuals figure out HOW to be secure every day.
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