Share not bare

With a little effort you can learn to protect your privacy on Facebook, says Vindu Goel.

Facebook is all about sharing. But if you value your privacy, using the service means deciding not only what you want to share, but also who gets to see it.
In theory, you have a great deal of control over the audience for everything you put on the service, whether it is the photos of your family vacation or that moment of weakness when you passed along that Krispy Kreme doughnut ad. (Uh, I hid that from my timeline, right?)

In practice, though, adjusting Facebook’s dozens of privacy controls can be tedious and confusing. Company executives realise that the complexity is a concern. Facebook has compiled answers to 50 frequently asked questions about privacy, offers tips at a central site and has a community forum where users try to help one another.
Over the last couple of years, Facebook has also altered the service to put relevant privacy controls next to each piece of information you are sharing.

“It’s not about going to a settings page to find some random setting,” said Blake Barnes, Facebook’s product manager for privacy. “It’s about going to the piece of information you’re concerned about and looking for the control next to it.”
But understanding a few key principles and settings can help you quickly gain more control over your Facebook privacy.

- You choose the audience for every post: Most of us tap out a status update or post a photo and assume that it’s just going out to our Facebook friends.

Maybe.

Facebook has a setting on the status update box that lets you set the audience for each item posted.

On the desktop version, it is right next to the “post” button. On mobile, it depends on your phone. On my Android smartphone, for example, the top of the update box says “To: Friends,” which means all my Facebook friends can see the post.

The “Friends” setting is what you will probably use most of the time.

But if you set it to “Public,” everyone on the web can see it - something you might want to do if you want to publicise your work or give a shout-out to your favourite TV show. If you set it to “only me,” no one but you can see it. You can even include or exclude specific people.

While this is powerful, it is also tricky because Facebook makes it easy to accidentally overshare. That is because whatever audience you choose for a post automatically becomes the audience for all future posts until you change the setting again.

So if you choose an audience of Public to share your enthusiasm during the Super Bowl on Sunday, make sure to change it back to Friends or something more restrictive before putting up your daughter’s birthday pictures.

My own rule of thumb is to keep the audience setting at Friends. That way, I am unlikely to post something personal in a hurry and then realise that I shared it publicly.

If you do make a mistake, you can go back and change the audience of a post retroactively or delete it entirely. And if you want to make all of your previous posts viewable to friends only, you can do it with one click at on.fb.me/M6IS9m.

For times when you want to share something with only your best friends, Facebook has created a category called “Close Friends.” The easiest way to put someone on that list is to pull up his profile, click on the Friends button and then click on Close Friends to checkmark it.

Then, when you choose the audience for a post, pick Close Friends and only those people can see it.

You can also set the audience for each piece of information in your profile, from every brand you have liked to your address and phone number.

- Privacy is controlled by the person who posts the item: One ofFacebook’s key principles is that the person who posts a piece of content - status update, photo, video - controls the privacy settings around it.

That’s logical, but a lot of people don’t understand the implications.

If you post a comment or a like on a public post - say, an article shared by a news organisation - it can be viewed by anyone, with your name attached to it. In fact, Facebook recently introduced a tool that lets people search the text of public posts and comments, and it is also sharing its feed of public posts to third parties like news sites and broadcasters.

How can you tell whether someone else’s post is public? It’s not easy, especially if you are scrolling fast on a smartphone. Look for the little icon next to the time the post was made. A tiny globe symbol means the post is public; the silhouettes of two people mean it’s for friends only.

Photos are another tricky area.

For example, somewhere on Facebook, there is a Halloween photo of me dressed as the Grim Reaper. I don’t have the power to take that photo down. I could click on the photo and untag myself and hide it on my profile page if I wanted. But it would still exist on the photographer’s Facebook page, viewable to her friends and all the friends we have in common.

The only way to get rid of it would be to ask the photographer to remove it. I could do so directly or I could click on “Report/Remove Tag” on the photo and ask Facebook for help.

On the flip side, you control the privacy settings of everything you post and can change them at any time. So if you don’t want your new girlfriend to see photos of you with your ex, you can change the privacy settings of all of those photos or albums to make them visible only to you.

The bottom line, said Barnes of Facebook: “When you share a piece of content, you’re the one that determines who sees that content, and when you interact with someone else’s content, they’re the one who determines who can see that and your interaction will be visible to the same people who can see that content.”

– Everything you do on Facebook can be used by marketers: Facebook doesn’t charge you for its service, but its biggest source of revenue is advertising.

More and more, those ads are targeted based on what you say and do on Facebook. A detergent company typically wants to reach mothers with young children. A local restaurant wants to target people who live in that city.

Facebook scrutinises every like, share and data point - even things you hide on your public profile. In my case, my birthday is hidden, but Facebook still uses it to customize ads.

Sometimes your actions on Facebook, such as liking or commenting on a brand’s page or post, can even become part of an ad that is sent to your friends. This emerging category of marketing, which Facebook calls social ads, essentially uses your action as an endorsement posted on top of a message sent by the advertiser.

You can’t opt out of Facebook using your information to target ads. But you can prevent your actions from being used as an endorsement in ads by going to on.fb.me/1eRTwsE, changing the box in the middle to “No one” and then hitting “Save Changes.”

– When you share something online, it’s no longer truly private: Like most online services, Facebook changes its privacy rules from time to time, so what used to be private could become public. For example, the company recently made it impossible to hide your profile from searches on the service.

But more important, once you share something with other people, you can’t really control what they do with it.