How safe are you on Facebook? Many people don’t think about “safety” when it comes to social networks, especially teenagers and young adults. There are about 100 different options on Facebook that control your privacy; who can see the comments on your wall, your picture albums, or now even your friend list. But is your information safe and do those privacy options always work?
Not in this one recent case: According to a TechCrunch Europe report, a gaping security hole on the Facebook site allowed any user to view the live chats of their ‘friends’ with just a few mouse clicks. There was a Youtube video showing exactly how this worked but that video has been removed now, possibly with the financial help of the Facebook management team. This is the statement issued by that group:
Chat is unavailable as we work quickly to fix a bug reported to us. It should return to normal soon. Because of the bug, people could view friends’ chat messages and friend requests for a limited amount of time if they manipulated the “preview my profile” feature in a specific way. We’ve fixed that issue and took down Chat as soon as we became aware of it. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
Now, that was just a bug in the program and it has been fixed. What we need to concentrate on are the standard Privacy options and how to change them. When you setup a new account, the Privacy settings are pretty wide open and show the entire Facebook world most of the information you put on your page. To alter privacy options, go to Account (in the top right corner), Privacy Settings.
Click Personal Information and Posts to see options about your wall and photos. Here you will see a plethora of options for your privacy. You can select from 4 different levels controlling who can view your information. The four options are: Everyone, Friends of Friends, Only Friends, and Customize.
Customize is where you specify individuals to block information. You can also block it from everybody by selecting ‘only me’ in Customize. Each photo album has its own privacy setting. You can take things even further by creating groups of friends on Lists, and then use those lists in your privacy settings.
Contact information and personal information such as city, state, education, and work can also be modified in the same way. When you click Privacy Setting from the Account tab, you will see all the options. Each one explains what settings you can modify with which menu. This section is incredibly large. You have over 30 choices to modify. If you are new to Facebook, it takes an average of 20 minutes to go through the entire profile. When you first sign up for Facebook, the default privacy settings are mostly set to Everyone and Friends of Friends.
After you’ve done changing all the settings, a preview is available to see how an individual sees your profile. It’s under Privacy Settings, Personal Information and Posts. There is button called Preview My Profile to view it.
Maybe we can’t control how Facebook uses our information, but as you can see, at least we can control who can see it (if only to keep that one nosy person away!).
