Facebook……About Face!!!

We’ve all, by now, heard all about the security changes made by Facebook. Basically, they have made the public facing nature of their service an ‘opt out’ option rather than the ‘opt in’ option it was in the past. Before these changes, Facebook kept most settings ‘Private’ by default. However with this about-face, all of your settings automatically become public, meaning anyone can view them. This in itself is bad enough, however what makes the situation even worse is that the controls to change your settings back to private are impossible to understand. There is no one central location to go to change everything that needs to be changed in order to keep your personal information from all being public facing.

So what can I do about it? Well there is a great website, named ReclaimPrivacy.org, that will check your Facebook account and let you know what security risks you have present. You can then make the decision as to what you want to do about these settings. What’s more, it is so simple to use, and none of your information from your Facebook account is collected or viewed by this site, as the program will run directly in your browser. You simply need to go to their site, and drag and drop a bookmarklet in to your browser’s Bookmarks Toolbar. Then you launch and sign in to Facebook. Once you are logged in, click the button in the Bookmarks Toolbar and ReclaimPrivacy.org will scan your account and then notify you as to what settings are public facing and what you might want to change.

I thought that I had my account locked down, and was only viewable by my friends, and in some instances friends-of-friends. But one thing that I did not realize is that I had left the door open for any friends-of-friends to share my personal information. This meant that my personal information could be relayed to 3rd parties without my knowledge or consent. That got changed.

Check out ReclaimPrivacy.org as it helps getting your Facebook account back to where you had it, a little bit easier.