Live from Austin!

Facebook has recently changed its sharing permissions. A lot of people have discovered that they’ve been sharing rather more information than they intended.

Some of the permissions screens for information sharing are quite well hidden in Facebook’s array of prefence pages and tabs. There doesn’t seem to be a single place listing all the privacy-related settings pages.

I’ve attempted to assemble a list, so you can work through them one by one and make sure your Facebook sharing is set up the way you want.

• Notifications: Choose when you get e-mail or SMS from Facebook.
• Facebook Ads: Select whether ads can show your information to other people.
• Contact information: Decide who can see your various addresses and phone numbers.
• Profile information: Set who can see the miscellaneous information you put in your profile (birthday, workplaces, photos, etc.) Don’t forget to check that your religious and political views are being shared appropriately. In addition, the “Posts by me” button is important, as it determines who (by default) can see whatever you post to Facebook. This can (following a recent change) be altered per post, using the padlock icon underneath the posting box.
• Applications – friends: Facebook allows your friends to share information about you via applications. This page lets you turn that off.
• Ignored invites: Got a friend who keeps inviting you to join Scam Wars or Spamville? Add them to this list to pre-ignore their invites.
• Search: Choose whether you can be found via public search on Facebook, and/or public search engines such as Google.
• Block list: The place to name your ex-boyfriends, stalkers, and other enemies.
• Application settings: Specific settings for all applications you’ve authorized to access your Facebook account. Use the X boxes to delete ones you’re no longer using.
• Application settings – Groups: A specific application you will want to visit is Groups; I can’t link directly to the edit page, but you should find it on the application settings list. The settings for Groups determine who can see which groups you’re a member of.
• Application settings – Photos: Another one to visit, allows you to hide the photos tab from non-friends so people can’t easily find all the photos people post of you. The “publish to streams” option adjusts whether people posting photos of you results in story entries on your profile page, whether or not there’s a photos tab.

There’s one other setting that isn’t on a settings page. On your profile page, the box showing your friends has an icon of a pencil top right. Click that, and a menu pops up. Hidden in that menu is the checkbox that controls whether your friends list is public to the world.

The Guardian:

In recent years networking sites like MySpace and Facebook have seen remarkable growth and become some of the most heavily trafficked destinations on the internet. But Danah Boyd, a researcher at the University of California and internet sociologist, says populations of different networks are now divided on a rough class basis.

Her evidence, collected through a series of interviews with US teenagers using MySpace and Facebook over the past nine months, shows there is a clear gap between the populations of each site.

“MySpace was the cool thing for high school teens and Facebook was the cool thing for college students,” she wrote in a paper available online. “The picture is now being blurred … it seems to primarily have to do with socio-economic class.”Typical Facebook users, she said, “tend to come from families who emphasise education and going to college. They are primarily white, but not exclusively”. MySpace, on the other hand, “is still home for Latino and Hispanic teens, immigrant teens” as well as “other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm”.
[...]
“A month ago, the military banned MySpace but not Facebook. This was a very interesting move because there’s a division, even in the military. Soldiers are on MySpace; officers are on Facebook.”

According to Ms Boyd, Facebook is not used by young soldiers, who are generally less well-educated and from poorer backgrounds, and there is an element of social conflict in the ban.

So, MySpace is Facebook for the uneducated?

Now here’s a funny thing: state agencies are now using the “PATRIOT” Act to obtain private profiles from web sites such as facebook.com, for people applying for any state-related job.

[Redacted]

In other words: don’t count on your “friends only” or “private” postings not ending up in the hands of any government organization that takes an interest in you.

While this example involved Facebook, I’d put money on other social networking sites doing the same and handing over your data with no questions asked—including LiveJournal, Yahoo, Orkut, MySpace and so on.