Careless “Friend and Photo” control could be the biggest privacy threat for avid Facebook users

February 24, 2009 · Posted in Entertainment, Featured, Political Issues, Social Issues, Society, Things to think about, Topic Blogs · Comment 

facebook1This is the second in what might become a small series of Facebook related blogs.  My first was an earlier satirical rant of the 25 Random Things List.  Recently, the Facebook gods responded to their users concerns with a general statement concerning content archiving policies and how much of this information they are disclosing to the user base.  This came in the midst of a user backlash where thousands deleted their accounts out of protest to the statements made by the company.

The skinny- it’s complicated and your privacy is not high on the priority list, nothing on the web is people.   In fact- the code behind Facebook is a complicated weave of spaghetti containing your content, photos, submissions, and any other items you submit for public viewing.  What does this mean?  It means your personal information is woven into a unregulated and uncontrolled virtual desert open to anyone – and FB can keep all your personal shit after you leave the party.

Whatever, whenever, or with whomever you send a photo, a wall post, a message, or an event – all that information gets stored on FB servers and can be retained for a long period of time.  The reason- the FB gods have designed the site to allow a deactivated person to easily come back and reactivate their account.   This being said- all content you submitted can magically “reappear” to make the process easier on you.  The rational is that communicated information is always “there”.   If you email me and five minutes later cancel your email account, does that email you sent me suddenly disappear?  No.   FB management has designed the site in the same fashion and for some reason it pissed a lot of people off – funny considering everything on the internet operates under the same logic.

There are two main blunders that users make.  The first mistake is compiling too many Friends without organizational control of who they are, how you know them, and what their relationship to you is.  The other mistake being poor security control over Photos and Tags.   As an experiment, a college professor once asked his students to stand up in front of the class, plug in their laptops, and show everyone their profile on the overhead.  Not one person volunteered for the request.  The thought of a FB profile being exposed in a room full of people invoked thoughts of embarrassment, vulnerability, and shame.

The professor had intentionally created a startling reality for his students.  They regarded their profile as private even though essentially millions of users, application developers, advertisers, search engine tracking software, and potential employers can see it everyday.

Back to the Friends and Photos thing.   Okay, so you’ve added some people who now have access to view your profile and you’re pretty cool with the results.  You do so some talking, share some photos, post some wall comments, update status to declare your current state of mind or relationships, or whatever.  What is often overlooked is the information trail that is created.   As your Friend’s list gets bigger, so does the audit trail of data, so does the list of people who can see it, which in most cases is cool, typically you add stuff because you want people to see it, no biggie.

However, as the Friend list grows, so does the accessibility to content that you might want to keep to yourself.   In fact, I actually know of people in the workplace who have unintentionally alienated themselves from co-workers because of the status comments they habitually post to their FB page.   Comments like “I’m tired of work” “Why am I here?” or “I can’t believe my manager just asked me to do something”.   As innocent as it seems to the poster, the internet has a sneaky way of delivering it’s own interpretation of content to the on looker.   You know that sarcastic email you sent to your best friend only to have them get pissed off?  It’s a common occurrence in the virtual world, FB included.   Apparently, these people forgot that they carelessly added half their office to their Friends list.  The same goes for Photos- photos that you personally would never post, but can you control how someone else Tags you in one of their photos?  Ahhh Haaaa – now that is where you’ll get in trouble.

There are Friend and Photo Tag security features that most users do not use very efficiently, or they just don’t know about them.   The basis behind these controls is to better categorize your Friends and place controls on who can see what, same thing for photos and who can see those you’re tagged in.


Nick O’Neill is a contributor to the website AllFacebook.com and is considered an expert on the proper and safe ways to use the site.  These are strategies that he offers users to better secure your environment:

1. Use Your Friend Lists

I can’t tell you how many people are not aware of their friend lists. For those not aware of what friend lists are, Facebook describes them as a feature which allows “you to create private groupings of friends based on your personal preferences. For example, you can create a Friend List for your friends that meet for weekly book club meetings. You can create Friend Lists for all of your organizational needs, allowing you to quickly view friends by type and send messages to your lists.”

There are a few very important things to remember about friend lists:

  • You can add each friend to more than one friend group
  • Friend groups should be used like “tags” as used elsewhere around the web
  • Friend Lists can have specific privacy policies applied to them

A typical setup for groups would be “Friends”, “Family”, and “Professional”. These three groups can then be used to apply different privacy policies. For example, you may want your friends to see photos from the party you were at last night, but you don’t want your family or professional contacts to see those photos. Using friend lists is also extremely useful for organizing your friends if you have a lot of them. For instance I have about 20 friend lists and I categorize people by city (New York, San Francisco, D.C., Tel Aviv, etc), where I met them (conferences, past co-workers, through this blog), and my relationship with them (professional, family, social, etc)

2. Remove Yourself From Facebook Search Results:

Now that you’ve decided that you would like to remove yourself from Facebook’s search results, here’s how to do it:

  1. Visit your search privacy settings page
  2. Under “Search Visibility” select “Only Friends” (Remember, doing so will remove you from Facebook search results, so make sure you want to be removed totally. Otherwise, you can select another group, such as “My Networks and Friends” which I believe is the default.)
  3. Click “Save Changes”

3. Avoid the Infamous Photo/Video Tag Mistake

drunk-tag

At the least, a tagged photo/video can result in personal embarrassment. So how do you prevent the infamous tagged photo or video from showing up in all of your friends news feeds? It’s pretty simple. First visit you profile privacy page and modify the setting next to “Photos Tagged of You”. Select the option which says “Customize…” and a box like the one pictured below will pop up.

tagged-privacy1

Select the option “Only Me” and then “None of My Networks” if you would like to keep all tagged photos private. If you’d like to make tagged photos visible to certain users you can choose to add them in the box under the “Some Friends” option. In the box that displays after you select “Some Friends” you can type either individual friends or friend lists.

Hope some of these tasty treats will make you a more intelligent FB user.

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