Tech Tuesday: Reclaim Your Facebook Privacy

Being a teacher, there are a lot of things I love to share online with my friends and family that I don't necessarily want my students or their families seeing. I'm a pretty open book and choose to live my life in a way that I'm not ashamed of anything that I choose to do. But there are some things that students and their families just don't need access to in my life.

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It's so easy to go on to Facebook and type in a person's name and find them instantly. If the person's privacy isn't set in a way that "locks things down", then you can see an awful lot of who they really are - pictures, location check-ins, their wall posts, things that others post on their wall or tag them in, etc.

Two years ago when I moved to my charter school and I found out who my new teammate was, I looked him up on Facebook. He was coming to Utah from Michigan and I was curious as to how long he'd been teaching, what he was like, if we'd be a good team, etc. He had no idea that his privacy was pretty much wide open on his Facebook page. The pictures I saw...the wall posts and comments...I thought for sure I wasn't going to get along with him. Everything was right there for the world to see from his college years.

Once I met him in person and we worked together, I realized he was a completely different person from what he was showing on Facebook. {You can't judge a book by it's cover...} I told him that I had creeped on his Facebook and everything that I had seen he may not want others to easily access, so he should consider changing his privacy settings. He had no idea that it was open like that, and he was glad that I had told him. Being a first year teacher, at the time, he didn't want parents of his students looking him up and seeing everything that I had seen. It gives the wrong impression. Sure, now that I know him better I understand all of it and it's him, but not in the way that I had initially viewed and interpreted it.

Did you know that you can easily view your Facebook profile page as "public" with two clicks? While on your main profile page, click the three dots next to "View Activity Log" - located at the bottom right corner of your cover photo. Then click "View As..."

This is my view of my own profile.

Once you're in the "View As..." mode, you'll see your profile as the public does. You can also view your profile as a specific person {that you're currently "friends" with on Facebook}.

As you can see, I have my profile completely locked down so the public can't see anything. For whatever reason, Facebook makes you keep your current cover photo public - so if you have any sort of info in the caption section, location, tagged people, etc., all of that will be publicly available to view. Once you change your cover photo, you can manually change "past photos" to "Friends only".

To get to your Privacy settings, click the lock icon in the top right corner of your Facebook page. It will bring a drop down menu like the one below. Click "See More Settings"...

• Who can see your future posts? - This allows you to change the default setting for when you write a "status update" post - whether it's adding pictures, just writing text, or sharing a link.
• Review all your posts & things you're tagged in - When you view your Activity Log, it shows you everything that you've posted, that you're tagged in, that you've liked or commented on, etc. The Activity Log shows you how everything is set as far as privacy settings go. Anything you like will be public, meaning that if you like a photo on a blog's Facebook page, others will be able to see that you liked it if they view the same photo.
• Limit the audience for posts you've shared with friends of friends or Public? -  You may have been posting everything publicly since you first joined Facebook and now are wishing that you hadn't. This setting allows you to change all of your past posts to "Friends" with one click. {This does not include photos.}
• Who can send your friend requests? - You have two options here... Everyone or Friends of Friends
• Whose messages do I want filtered into my inbox? - Basic Filtering is recommended {by Facebook} here, but if you get a lot of messages from people you don't know and it's bugging you, you may want to change it to Strict Filtering.
• Who can look you up using the email address you provided? / Who can look you up using the phone number you provided? - If you don't know what email and phone number you used to sign up, you can click on "General" on the left menu to view this information.
• Do you want other search engines to link to your timeline? - Personally, I don't want someone to Google my name and find my Facebook page. Not that it matters since it's locked down, but it's just not the first result I want listed if a potential employer is doing an internet search on me. I'd rather them find my LinkedIn page or something else that shows my character in a positive, professional light.

• Who can post on your timeline? - You have two choices - Friends or Only Me.
• Review posts friends tag you in before they appear on your timeline? - If you have friends on Facebook that take photos of you that you don't want posted on Facebook or that check you in everywhere you go and you don't want the world to know you're not home, you may want to turn this feature on. It will change your tagging settings so that you review what's okay and what's not before it's posted on your Facebook timeline.
• Review what other people see on your timeline. - This shows you your profile as the public, as I showed you in Step #1 above.
• Who can see posts you've been tagged in on your timeline? - If you're okay with people tagging you, but you don't want others to see it on your timeline, then you can change this setting to "Only Me". You'll see the photos and posts that others tag you in, but your friends won't {unless they're friends with the person who tagged you}. You can also change it to "Friends of Friends" or "Everyone".
• Who can see what others post on your timeline? - If you're cool with others posting links, photos, comments, etc. on your timeline, but don't want it shared with your friends, you can change this to "Only Me". Then you'll get the message, but others won't.
• Review tags people add to your own posts before the tags appear on Facebook? - If this option is off, it allows your friends to tag themselves or others in photos and/or posts that you put on Facebook. If you turn this option on, you'll receive a notification when someone attempts to tag themselves or others, and then you have the option to accept or decline the tag.
• When you're tagged in a post, who do you want to add to the audience if they aren't already in it? - Basically this setting allows your friends to see what you've been tagged in. Or you can change it to "Only Me".
• Who sees tag suggestions when photos that look like you are uploaded? - Two choices - "Friends" or "No One". What this setting does is allow others to automatically tag you when they upload photos to albums on Facebook if the picture looks like you. If you have photo tagging on, people can still tag you even if you put "No One" as your setting, it just won't automatically suggest for them to tag you while uploading.

• Who Can Follow Me - Following a person is just like following a Facebook page. It puts their post updates in your news feed. Personally, the last thing I want is "Everyone" to be able to "Follow" me and see everything that I'm doing, especially without being "friends" with them. That is just a whole new creep factor in my opinion.

A lot of websites and phone/tablet apps give you the option to sign in with Facebook now instead of creating an account. It's definitely a time-saver and one less login to remember. I, personally, love the ability to sign in with Facebook. But sometimes when I join something, I decide that it's not something I want to use and I don't want them to access to my information anymore. Under the App Settings section, you can change your settings and delete linked accounts.

If you click "Edit" for an app, you can see all of your options as to how the app uses your Facebook information and access to your account.

Have you ever used Facebook to sign up for something and they ask "Can we post to Facebook on your behalf?" and you accidentally clicked "Accept"? Here is where you can revoke that access you accidentally allowed.

 

For any albums that you create on Facebook, you can easily change the default privacy by viewing your Albums and clicking on the icon in the bottom right corner of the album. If you currently have a world icon, it means that the album is currently Public. If the album has the silhouette icon, it means it's currently only viewable to friends. You can also customize if you have lists set up for your friends. For example, I have the following lists: friends, family, teachers, blogging friends. If I only want to share an album with family, I can do so by customizing this setting for a specific photo album.

Those with a gear icon cannot be changed so easily - each picture has to be changed individually because you either uploaded it from Instagram or your phone {Mobile Uploads}, or it's a Profile Picture. [Side Note: When you change your profile picture to "Friends", it cannot be clicked on by anyone who is not your friend {anyone who's considered "Public"}.]

Any photos that are currently public will show up on your timeline in the View As Public view {from step 1}.

Everything that gives you an option to have your information/posts/tags/etc. public to "Everyone" or "Friends of Friends" are all settings that allow your Facebook information to be viewed by others who you may not be "friends" with. It's all up to you, of course, but I've had a lot of people - mostly family and friends - tell me that they had no clue what kind of information they were publicly showing...even if it was just to "friends of friends".

I hope that this post was insightful! Have a fabulous week!