Last week, I detailed the latest changes Facebook brought in with Facebook profile, the timeline.
By now, you've probably seen the new profile along with various other changes Facebook have been making to the social network. The latest changes to Facebook will no doubt confuse and annoy a few people, including my nan.
There have been mentions of privacy concerns relating to how much is now shared on your timeline, something that Mark Zuckerberg calls 'frictionless sharing' whereby pretty much whatever you are doing gets shared to Facebook. Be that, 'reading' an article, 'watching' a movie or 'listening' to music. I personally don’t have too many concerns as to how much I am sharing with Facebook, however, I do want to have control over what gets shared and is shown on my timeline. In this article, I will outline a few methods I’ve put in place to help me filter out and restrict the content that is shown on Facebook, and hope that you will find it helpful if you want to do the same.
Firstly, we need to go to the little arrow in the top right next to your name and select 'Privacy Settings'. From here, you can set a default setting for who can see what you have posted on your timeline. I’ve set mine to 'Custom' and chose to share with my 'Friends' except those that I’ve labelled as 'Restricted' or 'Acquaintances'. This means that out of my 400 or so friends, only say half of those are able to see my updates. This could come in handy if you wanted to stop your boss from viewing your posts moaning about work (not that I actually do this, honest!), or stop your parents from knowing everything about your life.
Now we’ve done that part, let’s delve into what can get posted to your timeline from other sources. It is possible for your friends to tag you in posts, such as a check in to some place, or a photo that they’ve decided to tag you in. You can prevent these from appearing on your timeline straight away, allowing you to approve each post. If you don’t want to share it with your friends, then simply hide it from your timeline. If you want to show it to only certain people, then choose who you’d like to share it with before it gets posted. This is known as 'Timeline Review' and can be enabled by editing the settings for 'How tags work'.
The big aspect to Facebook timeline is that apps can now post on your behalf to your timeline. So, when I decided to read an article on The Guardian the other day, it will have told my friends (except restricted and acquaintances) that I was reading an article called 'The Zombie map of the world'. I doubt many of my friends would have probably been interested or took much notice, but for those that would like to know what a Zombie world would look like, they can click on my activity and start reading. I suspect a fair few people out there will not want any of this information posted about them on their Facebook, so I’m going to show you how to prevent apps from doing such things. It’s relatively simple, if you look for it. Go into 'Account Settings' and then click 'Apps' on the left hand side, select an app that you'd like to edit and remove the ability of that app to post to your timeline, or remove that app altogether.
You should now be able to return to a fairly private world in regards to what you get up to on Facebook and the services that it connects to. Obviously, the data still exists to a certain extent, but then that’s kind of what we expect in return for using a free service that makes use of your data. Many people have said that they’ll leave the site as it now knows too much about you; and that is always an option, but then will you really do it and leave yourself outside the social network?