More Info About Facebook Privacy Controls Pt. 2

In my previous post, More Info About Facebook Privacy Controls Pt. 1, I provided some details and clarifications re. Facebook's current privacy settings that I had written about before.

This post discusses three more topics related to FB privacy.

Coming soon...

If you don't spend your days wondering what Facebook's future plans are for the site, I applaud you. But it probably also means you didn't see their recent blog post about some upcoming changes to the privacy settings:

Improving Sharing Through Control, Simplicity and Connection

When this appeared last week, there was a bit of a kerfuffle in some social media circles because some people were reading this as saying that Facebook was suddenly going to open all your posts to the entire world. They're not (they updated the post to clarify this, in case you saw the original one).

Now, even after I read the original post, I didn't see that problem. (I figure that most people just automatically assume any new big change Facebook makes is going to do things you don't want it to do, based on previous experience...) I'm not going to go into the upcoming changes in detail here because the new system is still in beta with a limited number of users (I'm not one of them), so they're subject to change. The full roll-out should begin in a few weeks.

However, from what I've seen, here are a few of the changes we might expect to see:

A single page for setting all your privacy controls (Yay!)
The ability to restrict some people from adding comments to posts (Yay!)
The ability to change settings for each post (Yay?)

The last point is the one that seemed to cause some misunderstanding but, from what I can tell so far, it's a great addition. Let's say you have your status updates restricted so only your friends can see them. But maybe you want to announce something to a wider audience—for example, you might have a written an article that you would love anyone to read. Without changing your default setting, you would have the option to set that specific post to be available to Friends of Friends, Friends and Networks, Everyone, or Custom settings.

Likewise, you may have set your photos to automatically be visible to all friends, but there's one particular photo you don't want your friend Jim-Bob to see. In that case, you could use the Custom setting to exclude him from that one pic.

One of the reasons being cited for this change is that it's another way for Facebook to compete with Twitter by being able to broadcase information more globally. I can't imagine ever using Facebook like Twitter but, as long as they're simply giving me more options, I have no problem with it. In fact, I think this will solve a lot of the problems people have now with what is essentially an all-or-nothing approach to privacy.

Your Facebook privacy and... TweetDeck?

A few weeks ago, I posted about how you can use TweetDeck to post tweets to Facebook. I've since discovered that there's another connection between TweetDeck and Facebook.

If you mouse over the right-most button at the top of TweetDeck, a tooltip pops up that says "Facebook Status Updates."

When you click this button, TweetDeck will create a column that imports all the status updates that show up in your Facebook News Feed, not including Pages updates. (If you haven't used TweetDeck to post to Facebook, you'll first be prompted to login to your FB account.)

And, when you roll over one of your friend's pictures, you get the option to either e-mail that update (via regular e-mail) or send it out as a tweet to all your followers.

Now, you may never have noticed this, but you actually can't Share your friends' status updates on Facebook. You can share links, notes, quiz results, and other apps (subject to your friends' privacy settings), but not basic status updates. Whether or not this is a good thing is debatable. But at least you could feel pretty comfortable knowing that if you posted something personal or sensitive or potentially embarrassing, it would be restricted to your friends' eyes only. (Of course, people can always cut-and-paste or take screenshots of something, and send it out that way, but that's generally not going to be a big problem.

However, now that TweetDeck has made it VERY easy (as in one-click) to share your friends' FB updates (and for them to share YOURS), it's all that more important that you remember the cardinal rule of privacy controls:

If you don't want someone to know something about you, don't put it on the Internet!

Don't trust the "See how a friend sees your profile" feature.

In an earlier post, I noted that the Settings > Privacy > Profile page lets you type in a friend's name so you can see how s/he sees your profile based on your current settings.

I've had readers write in to me a few times saying that they excluded a friend or friend list from seeing certain content, but when they entered that person's name in the box, they could still the content on their Wall. After checking out these issues, I've discovered that sometimes the problem is not with the application whose settings you're trying to customize, but with the "See how a friend sees your profile" feature itself.

For example, I did a test with a friend of mine. I excluded her from being able to see my events but, when I typed her name in the box, I could still see them. However, I asked her to confirm whether she could actually see them or not and she couldn't. So the privacy setting was working correctly.

If you run into a similar problem, you might want to try the same thing. Exclude a friend that you would normally allow to see a certain type of content and then ask him or her whether it worked or not.

Barring unforeseen circumstances, my next post on privacy controls will probably be when Facebook launches the new system. Stay tuned...

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