Facebook Timeline Privacy Settings

Facebook has been rolling out Timeline for a while, and just announced it is making the final push. Over the next few weeks everyone will have it with no opt out option. The most frequent question I get is how to control the privacy. The controls are very granular, although it may be tedious, I want to show you every location to make an adjustment.

About - www.facebook.com/username/info (change "username" to yours)

• Work and Education - Click edit; within this section you will see a small down arrow in the upper right corner. If you click on that you can define the visibly of your current and past jobs. That first one only controls your employment; further down on the right side there will also be controls for each education entry.
• About You - First click edit, then you can control the privacy with the down arrow.
• Basic Info - Click edit, then control the individual privacy for birthday, relationship, political views, etc. There are a total of six individual privacy adjustment in this section.
• Living - Edit to control the privacy of your hometown and current city; separately.
• Contact Info - Edit to change the privacy of every contact method.
• Favorite Quotations - Edit, then press down arrow in the upper right to control the visibility.
• Relationship or Family - Editing either will control both sections at once. You can not control individual family members; it is all or nothing.
• Pages - If you are the administrator for any pages you can use the check boxes to control which are displayed on your profile.

Friends - www.facebook.com/username/friends

• Friends List - Click edit to change the visibility of your friends list on your profile.

Photos - www.facebook.com/username/photos

• Your Albums - Control the privacy of each folder using the little down arrow. Be sure to click "see all" to control all of your albums.

Likes - www.facebook.com/username/favorites

• Favorites - Click edit to enter the change screen. Within there you can change the privacy of every section using the familiar arrow; be sure to "Save Changes" for every individual section.
• Like - These are the pages you like. To change the privacy adjust "Other Pages You Like" from the section above.

Timeline - www.facebook.com/username

• Favorites - Favorites are the small rectangle boxes near the top of your timeline profile page. You can click the little down arrow on the right to enter the editing mode. To remove one, hover over it, click the edit icon, then click "Remove from Favorites". To add one click the plus (+) icon on an empty rectangle.
• Timeline - You can adjust every post shown in your timeline by hovering over it. You can edit, delete, or hide a post by using the icons in the top right corner (when you hover on it) and/or change the privacy by clicking the icon next to the date. I have found it is easier to use the Activity Log to do this.
• View As - Underneath your cover photo on the right side is a down arrow. If you click on it, then click "View As..." you will see what your profile looks publicly to any user. Using the box at top left you can see how it look to a specific friend. To see how it looks to a non-Facebook user simply log out and visit your profile link.

Activity Log - www.facebook.com/username/allactivity

• Activity Log - Here you can view and adjust every like, photo, comment, and share since you started using Facebook. To the right of every line item are two icons. The first controls the privacy of the entry; the second allows you to edit, hide, delete, unlike, etc.

General Privacy - www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy

• Individual Posts - You set the privacy at the time of every post. Your last setting is the default for the next, so be careful if you switch between Public and Private posts.
• Default Privacy - This controls the privacy when individual controls are not available on certain apps.
• How You Connect - Control who can find you, send you messages, or write on your timeline (wall).
• How Tags Work - Adjust who can tag you and set your "Maximum Timeline Visibility".
• Apps and Website - Control what is shared with apps and websites and what they are allowed to do on your behalf.
• Limit the Audience for Past Posts - Change all your past posts to be Friends only.
• Blocked People and Apps - Add or remove blocked people or applications.

Simple, right? Not really! The best improvement Facebook could make is to have a single privacy toggle that will control/override/reset all the individual privacy controls. I do like having the control of each specific item, but it can be very confusing.

What's your take on the privacy controls? And, do you like Timeline better than your Wall?

Facebook's Auto-Sharing And What It Means To You

Facebook announced many changes last week, and over the weekend the chatter around the web and in the real world has focused on the privacy implications and information overload from their "auto-sharing" feature. There are many services like Spotify, Nike+ GPS, Foodily, and Words With Friends that are using this enhanced sharing. Lets take a look at what is going on and dispel some myths.

The one item that really needs to be clear to everyone is that you are in full control of what is shared, and who sees what is shared, on Facebook. The sharing is not automatic and needs to be specifically approved. With these new apps that connect using the Open Graph (Facebook's enhanced sharing protocol) there are new line items on the approval screens that we have become accustomed to. There could be new little check boxes to either check or uncheck, so be sure to read everything when connecting a Facebook account to an application.

You will see new questions about adding the activity to your timeline which encompass the news feed and ticker. This is where you approve/disapprove the apps access to share the activity. If you do share your activity you can further control who sees it through the privacy settings. The traditional public, friends, and friend of friends settings can be used as well as the lists and individual people, the option is even there to hide it from specific friends or lists. You have total control!

If you need to change your current settings head over to the privacy settings, edit settings for apps and website, edit settings for apps you use, then find the specific app and click edit. Once in there you are able to remove specific functions of it, change the overall viewing privacy, or completely delete it. If you want to take it off your new profile, once those are publicly launched, you can hover over it and select "remove from favorites" from the drop down menu.

On the receiving end, seeing all these updates can be just as annoying as the games. Luckily you have the "hide all by ..." option for these as well. I hope this clears up some of your questions and concerns. If not, please leave a comment below with your question.

Knowing what you know now, this video isn't so scary:

The Web is Public!

The web is public, unless you make it private yourself. This is the best advice I can give anyone. Twitter, Facebook, blogs, comments, everything... consider them all public unless you yourself changed, or verified, them to be private via a setting. Be sure to read privacy notices also; just because something is not publicly attributable to your name your information and comments may still be used. We live in public (interesting movie coincidentally).

The web is very open, you can be quoted, re-tweeted, linked to, published in physical media, etc. Your articles can not be copied word for word (unless you use something like Creative Commons), but they can be moved around twisted apart and re-written on another blog; hopefully they will have the courtesy to site the source as you. Your photos, stories, and articles are automatically copyrighted (in the US at least), meaning you do not need to file for an official copyright on each item.

If you have a public RSS feed for your blog your content will be republished everywhere. Search engines index your comments about as fast as you write them. Information if fast moving and fluid and can be around the entire world in minutes. Unless you know otherwise, base your internet use on the fact that THE WEB IS PUBLIC!

This post was inspired by the story of Sarah Baskerville who thought her Twitter feed was private.