7 Things to Stop Doing Now on Facebook

by Consumer Reports Magazine
Wednesday, May 12, 2010











Using a Weak Password

Avoid simple names or words you can find in a dictionary, even with numbers tacked on the end. Instead, mix upper- and lower-case letters, numbers, and symbols. A password should have at least eight characters. One good technique is to insert numbers or symbols in the middle of a word, such as this variant on the word "houses": hO27usEs!

Leaving Your Full Birth Date in Your Profile

It's an ideal target for identity thieves, who could use it to obtain more information about you and potentially gain access to your bank or credit card account. If you've already entered a birth date, go to your profile page and click on the Info tab, then on Edit Information. Under the Basic Information section, choose to show only the month and day or no birthday at all.

Overlooking Useful Privacy Controls

For almost everything in your Facebook profile, you can limit access to only your friends, friends of friends, or yourself. Restrict access to photos, birth date, religious views, and family information, among other things. You can give only certain people or groups access to items such as photos, or block particular people from seeing them. Consider leaving out contact info, such as phone number and address, since you probably don't want anyone to have access to that information anyway.

Posting Your Child's Name in a Caption

Don't use a child's name in photo tags or captions. If someone else does, delete it by clicking on Remove Tag. If your child isn't on Facebook and someone includes his or her name in a caption, ask that person to remove the name.
Mentioning That You'll Be Away From Home
That's like putting a "no one's home" sign on your door. Wait until you get home to tell everyone how awesome your vacation was and be vague about the date of any trip.

Letting Search Engines Find You

To help prevent strangers from accessing your page, go to the Search section of Facebook's privacy controls and select Only Friends for Facebook search results. Be sure the box for public search results isn't checked.

Permitting Youngsters to Use Facebook Unsupervised

Facebook limits its members to ages 13 and over, but children younger than that do use it. If you have a young child or teenager on Facebook, the best way to provide oversight is to become one of their online friends. Use your e-mail address as the contact for their account so that you receive their notifications and monitor their activities. "What they think is nothing can actually be pretty serious," says Charles Pavelites, a supervisory special agent at the Internet Crime Complaint Center. For example, a child who posts the comment "Mom will be home soon, I need to do the dishes" every day at the same time is revealing too much about the parents' regular comings and goings.

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Facebook glitch exposes chat messages

Thursday May 6, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook on Wednesday temporarily shut down its online chat feature after a software glitch let people’s friends in the online community see each others’ private chat messages.

For a “limited period of time” chat messages and pending friend requests could be made visible to friends, according to Facebook.

For peeks at the usually walled-off information Facebook users had to manipulate a “preview my profile” feature in a particular way, according to Facebook.

“When we received reports of the problem, our engineers promptly diagnosed it and temporarily disabled the chat function,” a Facebook spokesman said in an email response to an AFP inquiry.

“We also pushed out a fix to take care of the visible friend requests.”

Chat was back in action for most Facebook users by 1900 GMT and it was expected to be working across the website “shortly.”

“We worked quickly to resolve this matter, ensuring that once the bug was reported to us, a solution was quickly found and implemented,” the Facebook spokesman said. Crosshairs on Facebook

The software glitch struck as the world’s top online social-networking service is increasingly scrutinised regarding the privacy of members.

Slightly more than half of adult users of social networks have posted “risky personal information” such as birth dates or children’s photos to profile pages, according to a Consumer Reports survey titled Social Insecurity.

The survey indicated that 23% of Facebook’s users “either didn’t know that the site offered privacy controls or chose not to use them.”

Last week, four US senators expressed concern to Facebook over recent changes to the social network that they say compromises the privacy of its more than 400 million users.

In a letter to Facebook co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, the senators said they were concerned that personal information about Facebook users is being made available to third party websites.

They also said the Palo Alto, California-based Facebook should make sharing personal information an “opt-in” procedure in which a user specifically gives permission for data to be shared.

The letter was signed by Democratic senators Charles Schumer of New York, Al Franken of Minnesota, Michael Bennet of Colorado and Mark Begich of Alaska.

Senator Schumer has urged the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to look into the privacy practices of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and other social networking sites and to issue guidelines on the use of private information.

Privacy still paramount

Facebook on April 21 rolled out a series of new features including the ability for partner websites to incorporate Facebook data, a move that would further expand the social network’s presence on the Internet.

Facebook vice-president of global communications, marketing and public policy Elliot Schrage has been adamant that online privacy is taken very seriously at the company.

“These new products and features are designed to enhance personalisation and promote social activity across the Internet while continuing to give users unprecedented control over what information they share, when they want to share it, and with whom,” Schrage said. — AFP/Relaxnews

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POLISI KERAHSIAAN MAKLUMAT PERIBADI DI FACEBOOK SEMAKIN LONGGAR

Berikut saya paparkan maklumat penting berkaitan polisi kerahsiaan maklumat-maklumat peribadi di facebook yang dikatakan kian longgar. Sehubungan dengan itu saya ingin mengambil kesempatan ini untuk mengingatkan paadian-paadian samuha supaya berhati-hati apabila memberi maklumat-maklumat peribadi yang diperlukan semasa pendaftaran keahlian facebook. Salam hormat.

Facebook's Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline

Commentary by Kurt Opsahl

Since its incorporation just over five years ago, Facebook has undergone a remarkable transformation. When it started, it was a private space for communication with a group of your choice. Soon, it transformed into a platform where much of your information is public by default. Today, it has become a platform where you have no choice but to make certain information public, and this public information may be shared by Facebook with its partner websites and used to target ads.

To help illustrate Facebook's shift away from privacy, we have highlighted some excerpts from Facebook's privacy policies over the years. Watch closely as your privacy disappears, one small change at a time!

Facebook Privacy Policy circa 2005:

No personal information that you submit to Thefacebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings.

Facebook Privacy Policy circa 2006:

We understand you may not want everyone in the world to have the information you share on Facebook; that is why we give you control of your information. Our default privacy settings limit the information displayed in your profile to your school, your specified local area, and other reasonable community limitations that we tell you about.

Facebook Privacy Policy circa 2007:

Profile information you submit to Facebook will be available to users of Facebook who belong to at least one of the networks you allow to access the information through your privacy settings (e.g., school, geography, friends of friends). Your name, school name, and profile picture thumbnail will be available in search results across the Facebook network unless you alter your privacy settings.

Facebook Privacy Policy circa November 2009:

Facebook is designed to make it easy for you to share your information with anyone you want. You decide how much information you feel comfortable sharing on Facebook and you control how it is distributed through your privacy settings. You should review the default privacy settings and change them if necessary to reflect your preferences. You should also consider your settings whenever you share information. ...

Information set to “everyone” is publicly available information, may be accessed by everyone on the Internet (including people not logged into Facebook), is subject to indexing by third party search engines, may be associated with you outside of Facebook (such as when you visit other sites on the internet), and may be imported and exported by us and others without privacy limitations. The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.” You can review and change the default settings in your privacy settings.

Facebook Privacy Policy circa December 2009:

Certain categories of information such as your name, profile photo, list of friends and pages you are a fan of, gender, geographic region, and networks you belong to are considered publicly available to everyone, including Facebook-enhanced applications, and therefore do not have privacy settings. You can, however, limit the ability of others to find this information through search using your search privacy settings.

Current Facebook Privacy Policy, as of April 2010:

When you connect with an application or website it will have access to General Information about you. The term General Information includes your and your friends’ names, profile pictures, gender, user IDs, connections, and any content shared using the Everyone privacy setting. ... The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.” ... Because it takes two to connect, your privacy settings only control who can see the connection on your profile page. If you are uncomfortable with the connection being publicly available, you should consider removing (or not making) the connection.

Viewed together, the successive policies tell a clear story. Facebook originally earned its core base of users by offering them simple and powerful controls over their personal information. As Facebook grew larger and became more important, it could have chosen to maintain or improve those controls. Instead, it's slowly but surely helped itself — and its advertising and business partners — to more and more of its users' information, while limiting the users' options to control their own information.

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