Tag Archives: privacy

How to Limit Visibility of Facebook Timeline Items

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Now that it’s easy to go back in time to see what you posted on Facebook, are you sure you want everything visible?

Facebook’s new Timeline feature puts every update, photo, event, and detail in your life that you’ve shared on Facebook into a reverse chronologically displayed listing. Here’s what mine looks like today:

Facebook Timeline

At the top of your profile page is a “cover photo” and your profile picture. Beneath that is information about you, your work, and your relationships. After a box containing a few of your friends, you’ll find every single item you’ve ever posted to Facebook.

To make it easier for someone to zero in on a particular date in your past, they can drag a slider on the right side of the page. So if you’ve been posting on Facebook for a few years, people can go back in time to see the Halloween party photo when you dressed up like a hooker or your rant about your old boss or the details about the honeymoon cruise with your ex-husband. Intermingled with this stuff is details about your new jobs, vacations, check ins, and other life events you thought (at the time, anyway) were important enough to share with “friends” — or the public at large — on Facebook.

With your Facebook history so easily accessible — possibly to the general public (which is Facebook’s default setting for updates) — people can get a real idea of what you’re all about now and in the past. If you care at all about what people think of you, you probably want to examine your Timeline and make sure it shows only what you want to show — and only to the people you want to see it.

If you think you’re revealing a bit more than you want to in your Facebook Timeline, there are a few things you can do:

  • Limit AccessTo limit access to a specific post, click the Edit (pencil) icon at the top of it and choose one of the options that appears. Not all options appear for all items, but you can usually hide an item from your timeline or delete it. It’s interesting to note that if you’ve posted many items on Facebook that you regret — think drunk party photos or emotional rants — you’ll have to find and delete them one-by-one. (Have fun with that.)
  • Limit AudienceTo limit access to all of your past posts, go into Facebook Privacy settings and click the “Manage Past Post Visibility” link. Then click the Limit Old Posts button in the dialog that appears to make old posts accessible to Friends only. Doing this prevents random individuals from seeing old posts. Keep in mind that this is not reversible.
  • Limit Post VisibilityTo limit visibility to items as you post them to Facebook, use the pop-up menu at the bottom of the Update box to choose the visibility option you want. Public makes it visible to everyone. Remember, you can also limit visibility based on lists that you create and maintain on your own.
  • Default PrivacyTo set the default visibility setting for new items you post on Facebook — so you don’t need to remember to choose an option for each post — go into Facebook Privacy settings and select one of the Default Privacy options. If you choose Custom, you can specify which list can see the posts and specify people and lists who can’t see the posts. You can override this option for each item as you post it.

Keep in mind that the best way to keep details of your life private is to not share them at all — especially on Facebook.

How to Safely Use Find My Friends

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A few tips to retain your privacy.

Where in the world is?I love cool new apps — especially ones that keep me in touch with my friends and family members.

Find My Friends, an app that works on iOS 5 devices, is one of those apps. It plots the location — with stunning accuracy — for the people I connect with.

I wasted no time experimenting with it yesterday. By this morning, I had the locations for friends in Arizona, New Jersey, New York, Canada, England, and New Zealand. Zooming in on the map on my iPad put their dots on a street map. Tapping their bullets displayed their names, location label, and approximate street address.

MikeHeck, as my husband drove off to work this morning, I could see his progress as he drove down the street! How cool is that?

But wait a minute. Is it really a good idea to let people know exactly where you are at any time of the day or night?

The answer is: it depends. Specifically, it depends on:

  • Who you’re revealing your location to. Are these close friends and family members you know well and can trust? Or are they “friends” you met on Facebook or Twitter who might use your location information in ways you might not like?
  • Why you’re revealing your location. Do you honestly want people to know where you are, perhaps for a meet-up or to keep track in a crowded mall or amusement park? Or is it just a cool feature to play with because its new?
  • When you’re revealing your location. Are you sharing your location when you’re out in public and want to connect with people or keep them apprised of where you are? Or are you also sharing location information when you’re asleep, at work, or visiting other friends and family members, thus revealing their locations as well?

Find My Friends can be a great app for keeping in touch with your friends. Or it can be a tool for stalkers or burglars who can use your location information for their own purposes — which are not likely what you intended at all.

Here are a few things you can do to safely use Find My Friends:

  • Only share your location information with people you know and trust very well. A good rule of thumb is this: If you have to provide a “friend” with your email address, there’s a good chance he’s not quite as “trusted” as he should be to have this information. Make sure those people understand that your information is not to be shared with others. Also make sure they understand the implications of sharing their own location.
  • Temporary ShareMake use of the Temporary Share feature. This enables you to create an event with a definite end time. Anyone who accepts the invitation to share their location using this feature will automatically stop sharing at a predetermined time. This is a great way to connect with friends at a park or mall without having to worry about them seeing where you are once the event is over.
  • Hide from FriendsDisable Find My Friends when you don’t need it. On the device broadcasting your location (my iPhone, in my case), tap the Me button. Then set the option labeled “Hide from Followers” to ON. This removes your location from their devices. (I like to think of this as “stealth mode.”)

There are a few other security features built into Find My Friends:

  • If you choose to decline an invitation to share your location, the person who invited you will not be able to see where you are. If you don’t know someone who is inviting you, be sure you don’t accept their invitation to share location!
  • If you don’t lock your device, each time you enter Find My Friends, you’ll have to provide your Apple ID password. This is to prevent someone who has stolen or found your device from seeing the locations of your friends. You can disable this feature by requiring a password to access your device. You do this with the Password Lock option of General Settings.
  • If you’re a parent, you can set up restrictions on your child’s device to prevent him or her from hiding. You do this with the Restrictions option of General Settings.

In conclusion, I have to say that I really do like the Find My Friends app. Sadly, other than checking to see how close my husband is to arriving home and possibly meeting up with friends at an outdoor venue, I don’t think I’ll get much use out of it. Right now, it’s just a fun thing to play with — with people I trust.

What do you think? Share your comments here.

Upgrading WordPress to 2.1: The New Privacy Options

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A new option for bloggers who don’t want to be indexed.

Privacy OptionsOne of the new features of WordPress 2.1 is the Privacy Options administration panel. This panel offers two options that control whether your blog is visible to search engines and archivers:

  • I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers. This option, which is selected by default, allows search engine spiders and robots and crawlers to index your site and include it in search results.
  • I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors. This option makes your blog invisible to search engines and archivers but allows normal visitors to access it.

Why would you choose the second option? Well, suppose you have a private, family blog which is maintained solely for the use of your family. You wouldn’t want Google listing your entry about Aunt Sally’s colonoscopy as part of its search results, would you? The same goes for company-only blogs that are on the Internet but contains relatively confidential information.

Keep in mind that the Privacy Options do not prevent unauthorized site visitors from reading site content. Only password-protecting a post or securing the blog behind a firewall can do that. Instead, the search engine blocking feature just reduces the chance of someone stumbling onto the blog by accident as a result of a search.

To access this new feature on your blog, open Dashboard > Options > Privacy.