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How to quickly check your Facebook privacy settings

May 17, 2010 By

If you are at all concerned about your privacy on Facebook–and you should be– then you might be interested in a nifty bookmark  tool by ReclaimPrivacy.org I came across today via Mike Melanson of ReadWriteWeb . According to Mike:

The bookmarklet (essentially a snippet of Javascript that executes from your browser bar) assesses your Facebook settings in a number of different areas. It looks at personal information, contact information, friends, tags and connections, known applications that leak personal information and whether or not your friends can accidentally share your information. It also checks whether or not you’re currently sharing information via the controversial “Instant Personalization” that was unveiled last month at f8.

The bookmarklet is easy to install and this is what it looked like after it ran a scan on my own Facebook privacy settings.

Yikes!

To see if your Facebook account privacy settings pass, all you need to do is follow these directions from Mike’s article:

To run the bookmarklet and see how private you may or may not be on Facebook, simply follow these directions:

  1. Drag this link to your web browser bookmarks bar: Scan for Privacy
  2. Log in to facebook.com and then click that bookmarklet
  3. You will see a series of privacy scans that inspect your privacy settings and warn you about settings that might be unexpectedly public.
Filed Under: FaceBook, How to, privacy, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,

How to select Facebook privacy settings

May 17, 2010 By

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Altimeter Report: Social Marketing Analytics Demystified

April 24, 2010 By

Altimeter Report: Social Marketing Analytics

View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang.
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Groundswell Consumer Profile Tool

April 12, 2010 By

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Do you still have privacy on Facebook? How to restore your privacy settings

December 15, 2009 By

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5 Tips to Staying Safe on Facebook

November 13, 2009 By

While meeting with students from Wakefield High School in the Washington suburb of Arlington, Virginia, President Obama was asked for advice from a ninth grader who wants to be president someday. Julianna Goldman and Kate Andersen Brower reported for Bloomberg:

Obama offered, what he called some “practical political advice .. saying that “when you’re young, you know, you make mistakes and you do some stupid stuff.”

“I want everybody here to be careful about what you post on Facebook, because in the YouTube age whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life,” Obama said. “That’s number one.”

Goldman and Brower wrote that Obama also offered “I’ve been hearing a lot about young people who, you know, they’re posting stuff on Facebook, and then suddenly they go apply for a job,” Obama said to laughter.

Obama isn’t the only one offering advice on being safe on FaceBook.  Recently, Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb provided great tips to staying safe on FaceBook, no matter your age, in her article “5 Easy Steps to Stay Safe (and Private!) on Facebook”.

According to Sarah:

Unbeknownst to most mainstream Facebook users, the social network actually offers a slew of privacy controls and security features which can help you batten down the hatches, so to speak. If used properly, you’ll never have to worry about whether you should friend the boss and your mom. You can friend anyone you want while comfortable in the knowledge that not everyone gets to see everything you post.

The problem in implementing these privacy options is that they’re just too confusing for most non-tech savvy people to handle. And often, folks don’t want to bother to take the time to learn. To simplify the process, we’re offering five easy steps you can take today to help make your Facebook experience safer, more secure, and more private.

Sarah’s provides five detailed but easy steps to follow steps on staying safe. Briefly, these steps are:

Step 1: Make Friend Lists

This step–although time consuming–according to Sarah “will be one of the most useful things you can do on Facebook.”

Step 2: Who Can See What on Your Profile

In this step, you will need to “think carefully about the sorts of things you want public and the things you want private. Should “everyone” get to see photos you’re tagged in? Or would you like to limit this only to those you’ve specifically chosen as Facebook friends?”

Step 3: Who Can See Your Address and Phone Number

You can also determine who can see your address and phone number from FaceBook. You probably don’t want everyone to have access to your home address and phone number.

Step 4: Change Who Can Find You on Facebook via Search

Step 5: Stop Sharing Personal Info with Unknown Applications

According to Sarah, “Using Facebook’s default settings, you’re unknowingly sharing a plethora of personal information (and your friends’ info too!) with various Facebook applications and the developers who created them. The problem is so bad that the ACLU recently created their own Facebook Quiz to demonstrate how much information an app has access to.”

In this step, Sarah walks you through how to stop sharing your personal information.

You can read the entire article here

What steps are you taking to stay safe on Facebook?

Filed Under: FaceBook, How to, social media, Uncategorized, YouTube Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Filtering out FaceBook Friends

November 13, 2009 By

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It’s Good to Back Up, Tips for WordPress Bloggers and Gallery Users

October 20, 2009 By

Guest Post by Ken Lantz

You’ve heard that. You know it’s true. You may even have done it, or at least think you have done it. This has become an especially important topic for those of us who have a WordPress blog (such as this) or a personally maintained photo gallery, such as Gallery, an open source web based photo album organizer.

Smart Blowfish
Creative Commons License photo credit: Nano Taboada
It seems the first thing that’s emphasized is the importance of backing up the systems database. Most packages provide specific instructions for doing that. If you have done that you figure you’re done. After all your blog or gallery is the same thing in your mind as the database. The trick here is that the database is a particular thing used by web systems to enable them to function. It’s not your data your content its data about your data. After you have backed it up you still have not completely backed up your blog or gallery.

Your blog or gallery consists of three things:

  • the content (the wise words in your blog or the great shots in your gallery)
  • the program package that tells it how to work,  and
  • the database that describes its structure so it will work

The entire system resides on a web server somewhere. To back up the database you follow instructions explaining how to use mySQL to back it up and download it to your computer where you store it somewhere safe. Now, if anything happens to the system as it resides on the far away web server you would have a copy that can be used to restore the database, but you cannot necessarily rescue the programs nor your content.

To backup the programs and your content that are on the web server you need a FTP capability a package such as FileZilla to download them to your computer where you can store them.

There is one further consideration about backups that goes beyond what is needed to backup a blog or a photo gallery. What about any files that are stored on your computer that you do not want to lose?  Have you backed them up onto something that is stored away from where your computer is, so they will be safe in the case something happens to your computer or its location?

In the old days we did not have many of these files so we could store them on floppy disks or later on CDs. They didn’t take up much room and we could keep them at some other location we felt was secure. Now there are many more files and they have become quite large. Furthermore we’d like to back them up frequently and immediately move the backups off site. Two packages that can be used to accomplish this are Mozy and the new S3SystemBackup. One final decision you will need to make if you decide to use such a package is whether and how much to backup backups you have stored on your computer of your blog or your photo gallery.

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White House Communications Director Explains How to Control Media

October 19, 2009 By

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What Ben Bernanke Knows About Communication

September 21, 2009 By

Federal Reserve
Creative Commons License photo credit: skpy

What does Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke know about communicating that others don’t? In a recent article for Harvard Business, leadership consultant John Baldoni writes that it is Bernanke’s willingness “to speak last”. In Baldoni’s article “How to Communicate Like Ben Bernake” the author notes:

Bernanke, who established his academic credentials by researching and writing about the Great Depression, is first and foremost, as E.J. Dionne noted in the same interview, a straightforward speaker — people understand him. Bernanke, according to Brooks, also worked hard during the financial crisis to keep discussions going, even calling people back after a meeting to follow up. In this way, Bernanke seems more a legislator, one who works with peers, than an executive, one who dictates.

Baldoni recommends the following tips to keep conversation flowing:

Open up. If you want to keep discussion going, you should keep talking. If the topic is critical to the future of the company, throw out your calendar. Meet with your colleagues, even those who don’t agree with you, until you come to consensus, even if it’s only an agreement to keep talking. (Mediators employ this technique to help resolve disputes between adversaries.)

Give (a little) up. The secret to good conversation is give and take. Those who feel the need to impose their will gain little by talking. Those who want to reach consensus learn how to make concessions over small things to gain agreement over major issues. Dialogue is essential to facilitating that process.

Follow up. Important matters are seldom resolved with a single conversation or a single meeting. You will need to meet multiple times. Keep the dialogue going by following up with participants between meetings. The act of simple conversation can lead to greater understanding off issues and people.

You can read Baldoni’s entire article here.

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