Social networking privacy is becoming more of a concern for me as I now have accounts not just on Facebook, but also on Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc. etc. A while back there was a privacy notice that popped up when I logged into Facebook. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I thought. I clicked accept and went about my business.
Shortly after I noticed that I could view more information for people I didn’t know than normal. I could see their photo albums, their profile pictures, and in some cases their wall and contact information. I realized that some of my profile info could be exposed too. I logged into my dummy profile to check. As it turns out only my profile pictures had become visible as I had already adjusted privacy settings on many other things. It appears that the people whose information was more exposed may have left their privacy settings as default.
I really can only blame myself for the breach because I didn’t think to read the pop-up notice. I quickly fixed it. I would say that happened within days. It has been at least a month and a half and I still see many people that haven’t changed their privacy settings. I am fairly active on Facebook and tend to be on at least once a day for 15 minutes or so, but for those who are maybe not as tech savvy or not as active these changes may go unnoticed for some time.
If you are concerned about your privacy on Facebook adjust your privacy settings in the settings menu in the top right corner of your page. Be sure to also individually adjust the settings for each of your photo albums as those settings are entirely individual and independent from your profile settings.
Should you need further encouragement to protect your privacy read this eye-opening article at The Rumpus.
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Hmm ok, does anyone remember back in 2009 when facebook changed the default choice on the privacy settings to ‘everyone’? I think they simply did that to increase the number of pages visible in search engines and to all their users. I think they did this simply out of greed, because they knew that if more people saw more pages, they would make more money off of the advertisments. And they made this choice without caring for their users current privacy settings. But hey, what can you expect. Facebook is a corporation, and corporations make money.
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