How’s that for a post title !
Seriously though, this might be one of my more important posts, as it concerns privacy in Facebook. I wanted to do a separate post, as the inspiration for it – chapter 4 of quoted source below – was a bit low on clear instructions and screenshots, and might be too advanced for basic Facebook users.
As the article describes, it is a classic Facebook problem. It is the reason why many people stop using FB, or don’t use it like it’s meant to be, just because the user doesn’t understand it or doesn’t want to spend time trying to. Although one might argue that the default settings of FB are too ‘loose’.
So anyway, one of the biggest problems is that people suddenly see themselves appear on a photo uploaded by someone else. Not only that, it got tagged, so depending on your privacy settings, the whole world can see it. And that might be a bad thing if the photo depicts something you would rather have kept hidden, aside from a select group of friends.
People have been fired over stuff like that, and the option is hard to find, so here’s how you do it.
1) Go to your profile privacy page.
2) Click the option “Photos Tagged of You” and select “Customize…”. This box will show.
3) Here is where the magic happens. Depending on what situation you wish to create, you combine the options in this box. For me, I would like all photos tagged of me to be visible to all my friends, but not the friends that are related to me professionally. To do that, I select “Only Friends”, “None of My Networks”, and I exclude the friends list I created in the past to which I added all my professional contacts.
That’s it. You can even check this (and other settings) by viewing your profile as one of your friends ! To do this, follow these simple steps:
1) Go to your profile privacy page (which might still be open from previous action).
2) Click on the “Contact Information” tab.
3) In the text box at the top, type the name of a friend to test it out. For the example above, I can type the name of one of my professional contacts, and I can instantly verify that this friend can no longer see any photos ‘tagged of me’. Only my private albums in which I had photos not tagged of me were visible to this person.
It goes to show that friends lists are a great way of managing privacy in Facebook. It also makes it more practical to keep up to date of your friends of you have a lot of them. Make sure you read the mentioned article below for tips on public visibility (not just inside of Facebook).
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Inspired by this great article.
For those of you out there using one of the real browsers (among others, I am pointing at Firefox), you might find that version 3 of Firefox, while being a brilliant browser for the rest, built-in virusscan on completed downloads is a bit annoying. In my case, it always freezes for about two seconds while initiating the scan. Plus, having a good virusscanner already active, I don’t really see the point.
You can disable this feature by typing about:config in the address bar, and then filtering on browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone. Double click this line to set the value to false.
Problem solved.
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Talk to a Muzik Souldjah