Last semester, I began teaching a new workshop in Emory’s library called “Facebook, Privacy, and Online Identity.” The goal of the workshop was to help students become aware of how much they share on Facebook and to help them make conscious decisions about what they would share. I know that students, as well as almost everyone on the planet, have become more aware of The Social Network’s privacy issues due their policy changes in late 2009 and early 2010, as well as the media coverage that these changes drew. For this reason, I expected that the workshops would draw a large number of students. I was wrong. Over a total of four workshops, I had a total of four students come through.
I’m working on doing better marketing for this semester’s workshops, but I was pleased to see that all four of the students who attended the workshops were flabbergasted at how much information they had been allowing others to see about them. Each of them believed that they had locked their profiles down to make it impossible for a stranger to see anything about them. By the end of the workshop they had modified their privacy settings to produce the results they wanted, and we had covered concepts such as who’s in a “network” and what a “friend of a friend” is, two topics the students, it became apparent, didn’t really understand.
Here at ProfHacker, Julie has written previously about managing Facebook privacy settings (round one and round two). On a related topic, don’t miss Mark’s recent post about archiving your Facebook data.) Unfortunately, Facebook changes its interface on a semi-regular basis, so I thought it might prove useful to share the six steps I walk students through to help them check the various places where Facebook has tucked its different privacy settings. And yes, you read that correctly: there are six different steps for locking down your Facebook privacy settings.
Steps 1-5
You’ll find the first five steps under “Privacy Settings” in the upper right corner’s “Account” menu.
Here are the first five places where we’ll be locking down settings.
Step 1: “Connecting on Facebook” settings
On this screen, you can choose who can find your account when searcing on Facebook, who can send you friend requests, and more. You might, for example, consider whether or not you want those who you have not friended being able to see your friend list. Clicking on the “Preview My Profile” button allows you to see what your Facebook profile page looks like to general Facebook user whom you haven’t friened or how it looks to particular friends. After you’ve got these settings as you’d like them and checked them in the preview, click “Back to Privacy” to return to the previous menu.
Where Steps 2, 3, and 4 live
Facebook provides users with several different presets under the “Sharing on Facebook” menu under “Privacy settings”: Everyone, Friends of Friends, Friends Only, and Recommended. These all work, of course, but choosing to “customize settings” will give you the most control and is where we’ll tackle steps 2, 3, and 4.
Step 2: Sharing on Facebook > Customize Settings
There are many different options for setting privacy under this “Customize settings” menu—many more than this image shows. Go through each of the options and choose what details about yourself you would like others to see. Again, you have the opportunity to preview how your choices affect how others see your profile.
Step 3: Edit Album Privacy
On the same screen as Step 2, you’ll want to click on “Edit album privacy” for Step 3. That’s right: Facebook has buried a privacy setting within another privacy setting.
Once you’ve clicked on “Edit album privacy,” you’ll be able to set permissions on each of your photo albums. It’s worth noting that I only have one photo album; if I had more, I’d be able to set permissions for each album individually.
Step 4: Editing “Places” Settings
After finishing with your photo privacy settings, go back to the “customize settings” screen (from Step 2). Scroll down further to edit who can “check you into Places.” Yes, Step 4 is another buried setting.
Clicking on the “Edit Settings” for Places generates a pop-up window, in which you can choose to enable or disable the ability of your friends to check you into Places on Facebook. (Just imagine the horror if someone were to check you into a Monster Truck Rally without your consent.)
Step 5: Apps and Websites
Now that you’ve finished steps 2-4, go back to the main Privacy Settings menu. Even though “Apps and Websites” is on this menu, its title and description might not lead you to think that it would have privacy settings. It does, and that’s where Step 5 is.
On this page, you can choose which apps can access your account, determine who can see your recent games and app activity, control instant personalization, and–perhaps most important for tailoring your web presence—decide whether or not your Facebook profile will show up in the results of something like Google.
Step 6: Facebook ads
Unfortunately, not all of Facebook’s privacy settings actually live under the Privacy Settings menu. For Step 6, you need to choose “Account Settings” under the upper right corner’s “Account” menu.
Under the “Account Settings” menu, you should choose the last tab, “Facebook ads.” There are two settings to consider here, including one that governs what might be a future option for Facebook (!?).
Wrapping Up
So that’s it. With these six steps you’ve had a chance to consider what information you want to be accessible to others on Facebook. As you might be able to tell from looking at the above images, I’ve chosen to make my Facebook activities very private. But that’s just me. What’s your preferred setting for your Facebook privacy? Do you use the platform for personal or professional relationships?
Finally, I’m more than willing to admit that I don’t know everything about Facebook, so there’s every chance in the world that I might have missed a privacy setting. If you know of another setting to tweak, please let us know in the comments!
[Lead image by Flickr user opensourceway / Creative Commons licensed]
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62 Responses to Six Steps for Checking Your Facebook Privacy
reinway - February 7, 2011 at 8:54 am
Very useful, thank you! To this I would add: while Facebook asks if you are faculty or student when you sign up for a university network, it does not seem to differentiate in terms of privacy. If you join a university network, you add your students. You’ll need to double-check all your settings if you wish to make your page private (again).
briancroxall - February 7, 2011 at 9:08 am
Thanks for pointing this out, reinway. As I mention above, I’ve found that many people don’t understand exactly how networks work or the fact that you can remain in one even after you’ve left the school. This is one of the easiest ways that people can come across your profile when you might think that you’ve limited it to only people at your school.
fiver - February 7, 2011 at 12:44 pm
These are all great tips and I too have already made myself very private on Facebook. The only other thing I would suggest you show to students (or others) has to do with updating statuses. You can choose who gets to see each of your posts. I have a “professional” group I’ve made where I ask questions about sources, courses, and writing. I also have a second group that consists of family and friends where I share links to photos or stories about what I do on the weekend.
briancroxall - February 7, 2011 at 1:23 pm
Excellent idea, fiver. Julie previously covered using groups in Facebook, but using them with status updates is not something that I knew you could do. (Full disclosure, Facebook is something that I use as a venue for my tweets and not much else.)
e_eddie_edwards - February 7, 2011 at 4:42 pm
My preferred setting for Facebook privacy was to discontinue my account last December.
I was a member for a couple of years. I connected with some old friends, cousins, aunts and uncles. My “friends” included some people from work, and, I made a couple of new friends.
Around the time of the release of the movie, I found the experience had grown old. If everybody’s doing it, what’s the point? I felt it was time to limit the BS in my life. So I shut it down and went back to genuine human contact networking.
From where I sit, I find that face-2-face beats face-2-monitor every time.
donnabird - February 7, 2011 at 4:55 pm
That was very useful and enlightening!!! Thanks!
laur2582 - February 8, 2011 at 8:00 am
One thing that I have done is to create groups of my Facebook “friends” so that I can easily customize my privacy settings by group. For example, I have one called “limited profile,” one called “blocked from status” (for certain colleagues and family members), and one called “excluded from photos” for people I don’t know well, so they don’t see photos of my child or house. This enables me to customize by group, rather than individually. I have the most baroque privacy settings, perhaps, but I am fairly confident that no one sees what I don’t want them to see.
22228715 - February 8, 2011 at 8:10 am
I’m still adjusting settings. I went through and made about 10 different friend groups (trying to even differentiate between h.s. friends and just people I sort of know from h.s.) and then set privacy settings for each group. What I found is that when I made it more complicated (nested if-then privacy settings), I can’t always predict what they will see or not see. The ‘view from their perspective’ button is nice, but for some reason doesn’t always show what I expect it to.
Remember that if you prevent a person or group from being able to post on your wall, that becomes obvious to them when they go to contact you. They will need to send you a message (assuming you have that setting enabled.) The trick around it is that they can tag you in a photo, which then allows them to post on that wall.
You might want to also take a look at ways to entirely block individuals or groups. You can block them entirely through the privacy setting, and all they will see is the silhouette and name. Or, you can create a friend group and try to set it with the most minimal settings it will allow you to set. This still shows them personal info (likes and dislikes, etc.) but will give very casual acquaintances or potential actual friends limited interactivity and yet shields things like photos from decades ago, info about children, or your status updates.
briancroxall - February 8, 2011 at 8:48 am
Thanks, everyone, for your ideas about how you use groups to help manage privacy. I’ve broken my friends into groups based on where in my life I’ve known them, but perhaps I’ll start rethinking if I’d rather have more fine-grained settings.
ivanacg - February 8, 2011 at 10:11 am
Thank you for the guide. It is interesting to see how the settings work and I appreciated reading different people’s comments. Fb helps me keep in touch with friends and friendlies. I don’t have much time to fine-tune the settings so I instead moderate myself. Whenever I want to post something I imagine myself entering an empty hall (with lots of nooks and hidden places) and wonder whether — without really knowing who can hear me — I would shout out loud what I am about to say.
lburgee - February 8, 2011 at 2:21 pm
Well done. This topic is of great interest to me and I just don’t understand why students (and others) would want to post things on Facebook that could (as a result of lax privacy) result in embarrassment, shame, and possibly loss of a job, or result in a “non-job” offer (by an employer to be). I teach our students about “The Darker Side of Facebook” and share some “Things you should NOT do or post” on my webpage at http://www.burgee.com/facebook . The webpage has a seven-minute video of a recent news appearance where I share some first-hand experiences regarding this topic. It is also on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXmFtCWKRR8 . I wish all students would clean up their Facebook pages prior to job hunting! Please show this to your students.