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Friday, April 23, 2010

Tightening down your facebook privacy

As part of making the web more "social", Facebook recently announced a whole slew of changes in April 2010. In addition to that, some new things popped up under privacy... so you might want to take a look. For one, it now looks like you can control who sees your gaming activity to a greater extent (my non-gaming fb friends, I know you are tired of me begging for help to raise a bigger barn....). I am excited about that one and I'm not sure how recent this one actually is. (details follow)

>SHARING YOUR INFORMATION OUT ON THE WEB
When you login to facebook, you'll now see an information blurb about the new "like" button. Clicking on it, will give you alot more information, which is worth the read.

from Facebook:
When you visit a Facebook-enhanced application or website, it may access any information you have made visible to Everyone (Edit Profile Privacy) as well as your publicly available information. This includes your Name, Profile Picture, Gender, Current City, Networks, Friend List, and Pages. The application will request your permission to access any additional information it needs.


Um, yeah. So when you go to an outside website (e.g., CNN) if they are using a facebook plugin, you've just made information available to them. I would think the information sharing would not be a passive transfer (but that would seem to depend on the app), but instead would be based upon an action you do, such as "like" a story. Scary, no?

HOW TO TURN IT OFF (hopefully)
  • Account Settings>Privacy Settings>Applications and Websites
  • Instant Personalization>Edit
  • Uncheck Allow.

I've also now read that you need to go to each application and block it and turn off the functionality on that side.

PAGES (changes)

(which you now "like" instead of fan, so...)
When you go to your profile after these changes, a screen should pop up asking you if you want to link your pages to your profile. Your answer most likely depends on how tightly you want to control your profile.



Note, these are pulling from employer info and I am okay with those (for now), but I do wonder then how much they are sharing back with UGA. Egads, talk about alumni spam opportunities...

CONTROLLING YOUR GAMING ACTIVITY DISPLAY
Ok, I figured this out -- it is related to the Games dashboard NOT the wall post.
Sigh.
So far, I have been able to individually set posting for game posts to my wall, so creating a gaming list is useful. If the post has the lock, you can then just choose your game list.
  • Under Account>Privacy Settings
  • Applications and Websites
  • Click on privacy (audience group)
  • Click on customize
  • Build your list of fellow gamers or those who share other applications
If you would rather not have your recent application activity visible in the dashboards to your friends, you can change this through your Privacy settings . We're also working on a more granular set of controls for specific applications, so that you can turn off activity for certain applications while leaving it on for others.



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