The weblogs and even the NY Times have been all Henny Penny concerning a beta and possibly broad changes to how people can control privacy on Facebook, but the reality sounds much more subdued than the initial end of June panic. Despite reality being less frightening than some have predicted, this is a good time to do a social networking privacy checkup.
What is going on with Facebook and privacy?
Fecabook rolled out a beta of the new publisher (that box where you enter your status message, links, and other things) that allows people to select the privacy level they want on a per post basis. A combination of the fact that one of the options is to make your post visible to everybody, and the fact that the beta was only provided to people who previously set their status to visible by everyone caused some fear that we would all be soon living in a brave new Facebook naked of privacy settings and having to remember to lock away every single post. From what I can tell, past the hype, your default settings will remain if/when the new publisher goes beyond the beta tests. So let us checkup on your defaults.
Defaults?
In Facebook you can control your default privacy settings on several elements of your profile. You can even partition your friends into lists and specifically block certain profile elements from certain friends; this can be useful for separating things you want professional colleagues to see from all your friends/acquaintances/angry towns people who remember that wicked awesome toga party you once threw--no matter what you think, there are photos, and they will be posted one day. Facebook has detailed help on privacy settings. Pay attention to friends of friends and network settings thinking hard about who this might include.
Do not forget the search settings.
Separate from your default privacy settings are your search settings. These control what shows up when people search for your name. It is worth noting that one of the items you can turn off in your search settings is the listing of the pages you are a fan of. If you tighten down all of your other privacy settings and forget this one, everyone will be able to see that you are an enormous fan of Emo Sponge Bob and judge you based on that revelation.
