Martin Koss – thinking out loud…

Can you believe it? All these (sorry to say it) ‘sad’ people who are taking Facebook to court for breaching some privacy rule or another. What’s the big deal? We are in control of our privacy settings and can change them whenever we like – in DETAIL for everything we do.

As you can see from the above image, there is an option in the Privacy Settings for everything you do on Facebook – and you get to decide whether to make it Public, Private,  or Customized – for every Facebook feature. Let me explain.

Facebook Privacy Settings

Click on your Account link in Facebook and choose ‘Privacy Settings‘.

On this screen (as shown above) choose ‘Profile Information‘ as this is the bit that’s got everyone in a tiz.

Now you can see (above) there is an option drop-down for EVERYTHING on Facebook.

All the drop-downs give you the same options.

So you can individually set your preferred privacy for whether you want people to see your wall, your personal info, your religious and political views or your posts.

You can even set which posts are public and which can only bes een by friends or ‘friends of friends’. And, you can take it even further…

See the last 3 options in the “Facebook Privacy Page – Your Options” image; I have customized the options, which you can do to by choosing the 4th privacy option ‘Customise’ (not sure FB can decide between British English and US English).

Here’s a shot of me editing a ‘Custom’ privacy setting:

See how easy that is? Can we all stop fussing now and let Facebook get on with doing what they do best and providing us all with a free service that we all decide whether or not to use.

Oh, I forgot to mention… You can also set the privacy of individual posts (status updates) as you write them.

Ok – But what about Search Engines?

No problem – go into Privacy Settings again and this time click on ‘Search‘ (4th option) and in there you can set who can find you on Facebook Search and whether or not to allow Search Engines to index your page content.

Hope this helped…

Check out these books about Facebook on Amazon.co.uk:

 

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