Many of us in youth and family ministry have been drawn into Facebook since it opened to the public, or at least anyone with an e-mail address, in September of 2006. Prior to that you could only join if you were a high school or college student. Now it seems that just about everyone, even my wife who held out until March, has a Facebook account. It’s almost a necessity in order to communicate with high school and college students today, family members, and even those that you went to high school or college with a few, or many, years ago. But there are those privacy concerns...
I looked at the Wikipedia article for Facebook to check out the date that the service was opened to the public and got drawn into the story of its founding by Mark Zuckerberg. Given that much of the recent news about Facebook involves the privacy settings of the site, it’s interesting that the first iteration of the site actually hacked into the accounts of others to give them a public page!
Facebook has been in hot water before for things that they chose to make public that people had not given explicit permission to publicize. One example I remember was a concern about sharing purchase information that could let others know what gifts you were getting them! Because Facebook is always changing their privacy settings, it is a good idea to check into how you have things set every now and again.
I understand that there are new privacy settings being rolled out - here’s a New York Times article detailing those - but I don’t have those yet, so this applies to the current version of Facebook. The new settings will likely be similar, so maybe the instructions will still be valid!
Go to www.facebook.com/privacy and sign in to your account. Each of the items in the list controls a realm of settings. Click on Personal Information and Posts and adjust the settings to your liking. Make sure you’re not sharing anything with Everyone that you don’t wish to. When you’re done, be sure and click the Back to Privacy Settings link to save your settings. Clicking on the Edit Settings link by Photo Albums will take you to a new screen and not save your settings!
Once you’ve set that category, start going down the list and setting the other categories. One area I was glad to change the setting in was on the Applications and Websites page, under the Ignore Application Invites setting. If you have friends who are constantly inviting you to play certain games, add their names to this list and you will no longer see those invites.
After you get all the way through that list, be sure and visit www.facebook.com/editapps.php and check the applications that you have given access to. Click the Show: dropdown and select Authorized to see all the applications that you’ve authorized to allow access to your account. You can then click the X to remove them if you’re not using them anymore or click the Profile link to learn more about what a certain application does or the Edit Settings link to edit the settings! Some applications are part of the core Facebook site and cannot be removed. I removed about a dozen applications that I haven’t used in ages and don’t need access to my information anymore.
Get in the habit of reviewing these settings every so often and cleaning out the applications you’re no longer using. Remember that anything you post to Facebook, or anything that someone else tags you in, is part of who you are online. Your youth group members, family, and potential new calls could all use it to form their impression of who you are, for better, and for worse. Especially if you have all the sharing settings set to Everyone!
One other setting in Facebook that I only discovered recently was that you can turn off chat. Expand the Facebook Chat window and then click on Options. Select Go Offline and you won’t have to worry anymore about old high school friends interrupting your game of Bejeweled Blitz!
I looked at the Wikipedia article for Facebook to check out the date that the service was opened to the public and got drawn into the story of its founding by Mark Zuckerberg. Given that much of the recent news about Facebook involves the privacy settings of the site, it’s interesting that the first iteration of the site actually hacked into the accounts of others to give them a public page!
Facebook has been in hot water before for things that they chose to make public that people had not given explicit permission to publicize. One example I remember was a concern about sharing purchase information that could let others know what gifts you were getting them! Because Facebook is always changing their privacy settings, it is a good idea to check into how you have things set every now and again.
I understand that there are new privacy settings being rolled out - here’s a New York Times article detailing those - but I don’t have those yet, so this applies to the current version of Facebook. The new settings will likely be similar, so maybe the instructions will still be valid!
Go to www.facebook.com/privacy and sign in to your account. Each of the items in the list controls a realm of settings. Click on Personal Information and Posts and adjust the settings to your liking. Make sure you’re not sharing anything with Everyone that you don’t wish to. When you’re done, be sure and click the Back to Privacy Settings link to save your settings. Clicking on the Edit Settings link by Photo Albums will take you to a new screen and not save your settings!
Once you’ve set that category, start going down the list and setting the other categories. One area I was glad to change the setting in was on the Applications and Websites page, under the Ignore Application Invites setting. If you have friends who are constantly inviting you to play certain games, add their names to this list and you will no longer see those invites.
After you get all the way through that list, be sure and visit www.facebook.com/editapps.php and check the applications that you have given access to. Click the Show: dropdown and select Authorized to see all the applications that you’ve authorized to allow access to your account. You can then click the X to remove them if you’re not using them anymore or click the Profile link to learn more about what a certain application does or the Edit Settings link to edit the settings! Some applications are part of the core Facebook site and cannot be removed. I removed about a dozen applications that I haven’t used in ages and don’t need access to my information anymore.
Get in the habit of reviewing these settings every so often and cleaning out the applications you’re no longer using. Remember that anything you post to Facebook, or anything that someone else tags you in, is part of who you are online. Your youth group members, family, and potential new calls could all use it to form their impression of who you are, for better, and for worse. Especially if you have all the sharing settings set to Everyone!
One other setting in Facebook that I only discovered recently was that you can turn off chat. Expand the Facebook Chat window and then click on Options. Select Go Offline and you won’t have to worry anymore about old high school friends interrupting your game of Bejeweled Blitz!
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