Controlling How You Share

Most of my recent posts have had to deal with privacy issues on Facebook. This is because it has been a cluster of screw ups for a very long time and many people have sent me questions dealing with how to secure their privacy. Privacy seems to be a relative term in conjunction with Facebook and how it portrays you in the digital universe.

Now, Facebook has again altered the way in which we choose the privacy options for our accounts. Please note that FB did not change any of our previous settings, only the way in which we get to those settings.

You can learn more about how the controls have changed by clicking "Learn More" in the dialogue box at the top of your screen, or you can go to: http://www.facebook.com/privacy/explanation.php

The new controls are an attempt to make privacy settings easier and more obvious to the user.

It is easier to get to all of the controls in Facebook. You can access your Privacy Controls by clicking Account > Privacy Settings. That's it! Then there are four areas of the screen that need your attention.

1.  Sharing on Facebook is the content you post on Facebook on a day to day basis. You may change the privacy settings for each of these items.The default is the Recommended Settings. But there are other options beside Everyone, Friends of Friends and Friends Only. To change to tighter privacy, I suggest clicking Customize Settings in the lower left of the right hand panel. Then you may change from the recommended settings to allow only certain lists of friends to access portions or all of your personal information.

2. Basic Directory Information is the information available to everyone by default and cannot be changed.

3.  Applications and Websites allows you make changes to which applications you use, Game and Application Activity, Info Accessible Through Your Friends, Instant Personalization and the information that is available by Public Search.

4. Block Lists is the list of blocked users, applications and application invites as determined by you.

This is all much more concise than the previous privacy attempt, but doesn't provide any more control than the previous version. Make sure you use the Customize Settings option everywhere available. Use lists to determine sub groups which can view your specific profile information.

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Reclaim Your Privacy On Facebook

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Today, there's a better way to make sure that your Facebook privacy is as private as possible. Now there is one place to click in order to fix-up your profile.

Test Your Facebook Privacy

You can test your Facebook privacy by using a tool is called ReclaimPrivacy, and its name says it all. All you have to do is;

1. Drag this link to your web browser bookmarks bar:                                 Scan for Privacy
2. Go to your Facebook privacy settings and then click that bookmark once you are on Facebook.
3. You will see a series of privacy scans that inspect your privacy settings and warn you about settings that might be unexpectedly public.
4. Follow them on Facebook to hear about the latest updates.

You can surf over to ReclaimPrivacy.org and look for the link that says "Scan for Privacy." Add that link as a bookmark in your browser, either by dragging it onto a bookmark toolbar or by right-clicking it and selecting the "Bookmark" option.
Now head over to Facebook. Sign into your account, then open the bookmarked link.
This will cause ReclaimPrivacy's Facebook privacy scanner to open right at the top of your current Facebook window. Within a few seconds, ReclaimPrivacy will scan through six areas of potential privacy concern and let you know how your account stacks up.

ReclaimPrivacy analyzes everything from your personal information controls to your "instant personalization" settings. It even checks account settings that affect what your friends could inadvertently share about you without your knowledge.

For each area, ReclaimPrivacy will give you a green ("good"), yellow ("caution"), or red ("insecure") ranking. If you hit yellow or red, it'll provide you with specific steps to fix the problem so you don't have to waste time searching for the right setting.

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5 Ways To Protect Your Facebook Account

Reaching maximum privacy with your Facebook account now requires clicking through 50 different settings and over 170 different options. And that isn't even close to completely safeguarding your personal information.

Facebook's current privacy policy is about 5800 words. This makes it about 1200 words longer than the Constitution of the United States. How many of us are going to wade through that? It's impossible to achieve total privacy on Facebook, but there are ways to maximize your protection. Here are 5 ways to protect your Facebook account;

1.  Hide your profile information from the public. It could be argued whether the average user needs to hide their profile information or not, but every child should be protected as much as possible. This may require parents to be proactive and check the settings for their children.

In the upper right hand of the Facebook page (either from your home page or profile page) Click Account > Privacy Settings > Personal Information and Posts. Make sure to adjust privacy for all 9 categories. Most of these should be set as "Only Friends", but you can set them to "Only Me".

Click the  Back to Privacy button in the upper left of the screen. Click   Contact Information. Adjust your privacy settings for all 8 of these categories. Most if not all should be set as "Only Friends".

Now Click  Back to Privacy > Friends, Tags & Connections. Adjust all 10 categories. If you don't want information about you to leak to strangers, DO NOT set to "Everyone".


2.  Protect yourself from Facebook ads. Yes, Facebook uses your information for advertising purposes and your friends may see your name in some advertising or may be able to see your actions to social ads.

To protect your information from ads, click  Account > Account Settings > Facebook Ads and select "No One" beside Allow ads on platform pages to show my information to, and then scroll down to Show my social actions in Facebook Ads to and do the same.


3.  Remove yourself from The Instant Personalization Pilot Program. Your profile information is shared with thid party web sites currently including Microsoft Docs, Pandora and Yelp.

In the upper right hand corner of the Facebook page, click Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites. Click Edit Setting beside Instant Personalization Program and uncheck the box at the bottom of the screen.


4.  Control what information your friends may be sharing about you. Even if you uncheck the box for the Instant Personalization Pilot Program, your information may still be accessed by websites through your friends. Unless you block each individual website's applications. Your friends may be sharing your information with applications and third party websites that you don't even use. Note that ALL applications are able to access your Name, Profile Picture, Gender, as well as any information that is visible to Everyone.

Click Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites > What your friends can share about you and uncheck all of the boxes.


5.  Monitor which devices may access your Facebook account. This tool was just released in the past week, but has not been advertised as of this post. After making this change, you will be asked to name the computer or device you are using to access Facebook. You will then receive an email with the name of the device used. This will allow you to know if someone logs into your account from another computer.

click Account > Account Settings > Account Security. Click "YES" below Would you like to receive notifications for logins from new devices?



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Facebook Altering User Profiles

This last week, Facebook moved to provide “Instant Personalization” on partner Web sites, like Yelp, Microsoft Docs and Pandora. This  stirred privacy concerns once again for Facebook users. But a related change is also being received poorly by users.

Facebook also began altering users’ profiles by asking them if they wanted to link information like current city, hometown, school and workplace history, and likes and interests to related Facebook Pages. The move could to push many Facebook users away from stricter privacy settings selected previously, since Facebook considers “connections” to Pages public information.

There have been thousands of complaints on the Facebook blog postprotest page created by users. The complaint is about the weakening privacy and continuing commercialism on Facebook. explaining the changes and on a 

This change has infuriated many users by deleting text they had entered about themselves in their profile. The ‘connections’ change Users allow the links to be made by the "Connections" modification without realizing their profiles will be extensively altered and their text deleted. But, there is a way to change these connections.

The Bottom Line:

Users can disconnect from a Page any time by visiting the Page and selecting “Unlike” on the bottom left or by clicking the pencil “Edit Information” icon in the Info section of their profile page, selecting “Page” and then clicking “Remove” underneath the photo. While editing a profile, users can also highlight certain connections by dragging and dropping the given Page above the fold and de-emphasize others by dragging and dropping them below the fold.

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Related Articles

•  Facebook: Privacy Made Public (plainanswers4u.blogspot.com)
• Facebook Takes Fire From Senators Over Privacy (gigaom.com)
• Facebook Employee: Mark Zuckerberg Doesn't Believe in Privacy (shoppingblog.com) 
• Activist groups launch new Facebook privacy offensive (news.cnet.com)

Deactivating "Instant Personalization"

Facebook launched "Instant Personalization" along with other privacy changes last week. This change shares user information with third party web sites Yelp, Microsoft Docs and Pandora. It also opens the door to other partners and advertisers to glean more information about you.

Two nonprofit groups, in response to Facebook's privacy changes last week, put out messages to voice their opposition: The Electronic Frontier Foundation published a timeline of Facebook's privacy policy modifications over the years, and liberal activist group MoveOn.org launched a Facebook group called "Facebook, respect my privacy!".

"They've launched a new program that shares info about you and your friends with external websites--whether you want them to or not," the MoveOn.org group, which had over 14,000 members on Friday afternoon, explained. "They're calling it 'instant personalization.' We're calling it a major violation of your privacy. Again."

There are ways to stop personalization on the partner sites. You can opt out on the sites web page individually or you can opt out on the Facebook site itself. These options are not made clear on either the Facebook or partner web sites, but here is how you do it.


The Bottom Line:

• When you first visit any of these three partner sites while logged into Facebook, you’ll see a blue bar appear at the top of the site letting you know that your experience is being personalized. You can choose to learn more, remove the personalized experience or click "x" to remove the bar.

• If you don't want your experience personalized on these limited number of sites, you can opt out by clicking here. You can also navigate there by going to 'Account' > 'Privacy settings' > 'Applications and Websites' > 'Instant Personalization Pilot Program'

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Related Articles

• Activist groups launch new Facebook privacy offensive (news.cnet.com)
• Timeline of Facebook privacy policy: from reasonable (2005) to apocalyptic (2010) (boingboing.net)
• Facebook's moves and personalized advertising (glinden.blogspot.com)

Koob-Face Coming Round Again

Alert your mob bosses and bring your farm animals into the stable. Koob-face is rearing it's ugly head again and targeting Facebook and Twitter users.

Once again hackers are using messages on Facebook and Twitter to lure would-be victims to click on a link. They promise wealth, fame, fortune, the ability to help someone in trouble, and a myriad of other things to get you to click. One of the most recent scams is to make messages look like they are coming from a friend in trouble away from home. They request money be sent by wire. This scam hurts your friends as well as your credibility.

 Also, they want you to click on a link to download a special program for viewing their content. This is really spyware. It infects your computer and then it sends the same deceptive message to all your Facebook friends.

  Jeff Debrosse, a computer security specialist says, "Just one person getting an infection on a social networking site actually opens the door to thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, or millions getting infected".

"Koob-face" has been around for a while, but hackers are once again trying to lure gullable Facebook users to give up their personal information with new tricks, according to McAfee.

E-mails with a subject line of "Facebook Password Reset Confirmation! Customer Support" are sent saying that people's passwords on their Facebook accounts have been reset and that they should log in to a site to get their new credentials.  But if the attachment is opened, it downloads several types of malicious software, including a program that steals passwords, McAfee said.

You can keep your computer secure by always checking out a link before clicking it (See- "Check Out The Links For Safety"), always use an up-to-date browser, which may recognize the newest threats, and by keeping your anti-virus software up to date.


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• Password-stealing virus targets Facebook users (msnbc.msn.com)
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Facebook: Privacy Made Public

Where is the privacy in Facebook's "Privacy Policy"? The new policy allows more information to be available to the general public. A comparison of the new and old policies reveals this addition:

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.

 

As of Christmas eve, 2009, I have been unable to find any way to privatize this information. You can limit the scope of your search privacy. By default the setting seems to be "Everyone". To change this, go to "Privacy Settings", and then click "Search". On this screen you can choose to allow searching your information with everyone, friends and networks, friends of friends, or friends. You may also "uncheck" the box which allows public search results by search engines, although the results of this change, are yet to be determined.

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• Protecting Your Facebook Groups (plainanswers4u.blogspot.com)
• Facebook Changes Privacy Options (plainanswers4u.blogspot.com)
• Facebook Apologizes for their Privacy screw-up... kind of! (thoughtpick.com)

Protecting Your Facebook Groups

Facebook has changed its formal Privacy Policy among other things, to say that "pages you are a fan of... and networks" are now public information. By default the pages and networks that you belong to, can now be seen by anyone. This could allow someone to find information about you without being in your friends list. You may not want just anyone to view this information.

You can change this by going to the top of the page and clicking "Settings", and then scroll to "Application Settings". In the following window, click "Edit Settings" next to the "Groups" category. You may then choose whom you would like to allow access to this information. If you do not wish for anyone else to have access to this information, set to "Only Me".

If you want, you can "Customize" your Edit Group Settings to allow only certain friends or networks to view the groups in which you belong. Using this feature allows you to include or exclude individual friends or groups. Clicking "Additional Permissions" allows you to keep your groups and pages from publishing to your wall stream and allows you to set for which group changes you get an email from Facebook.

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• Policy Watch: Facebook Says Updated Platform Rules Going Into Effect December 16th (insidefacebook.com)
• Facebook updates privacy policy (cbc.ca)
• Facebook Changes Privacy Options. (plainanswers4u.blogspot.com)

Facebook Changes Privacy Options

Image by dannysullivan via Flickr

Chances are you may have seen the Facebook pop-up which asks you to update your privacy settings. In an ideal world these changes would be for the benefit of the user but, Facebook has changed it's privacy options in order to allow more information to be shared online. Their hope is that users will allow more of their information to be viewed by the masses and keep less information to themselves and specific friends.

These changes are not for the individual user's benefit. They are about generating more users and maximizing advertising. Facebook is hoping that the user will stay with the default settings given, in the security pop-up, and not change them to the "Old Settings" option provided.

Facebook insists that it has gone out of its way to inform its users that the privacy settings were changing. It also points out that the privacy settings can be kept, just as they are now if the user specifies that they are to be kept. The problem in the eyes of the user groups is that the default or recommended settings opens the profiles up to many more viewers.



Bottom Line; Do not keep the recommended settings, but do check the boxes to keep your old settings intact. Routinely check your privacy settings.

Related Articles

• Privacy watchdog files complaint against Facebook (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Privacy groups challenge Facebook (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Facebook privacy concerns remain: commissioner (cbc.ca)

Facebook Tip; Keep Your Friends Close And The "Others" Far Away

Who can you trust?

Usually if a Facebook user is in your friends list, the likelihood of it being a scammer is very low.  There have been instances of hacked user accounts, but usually this is done by someone who knows the user and may be playing a trick on them. We hope.

The issue  now is someone or 'ones' is creating fake Facebook accounts and using them to distribute malware.  This is usually done with a link to a video. Normally you get a pop-up that tells you to download additional software to view the video.  Wala, you just downloaded malware that can completely take over your computer or render it nearly useless.

In a statement, a Facebook spokesperson said, “We’re working to identify the handful of fake accounts that were created and disable them.  The URL contained in the profiles has already been blacklisted by the major web browsers and blocked from being shared on Facebook.  We use an outside captcha company called reCAPTCHA (http://recaptcha.net), which was recently acquired by Google and is a very well-regarded captcha provider.

To beat hackers, do at least these three things;

•  MAKE SURE YOUR PASSWORD is at least 8 - alpha and numeric characters in length and does not spell anything, and/or contain a sequence of numbers or letters.

•  NEVER accept friend requests from people you don't know.  Some people try to get as many 'friends' as they can, but the downside could be getting your account hacked.

•  NEVER OPEN or authorize your computer/program to open any file that you ARE NOT CERTAIN IS SAFE.  If a web page asks you to download something to view their page, it probably is not a kosher request.

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Your Facebook Applications Are Attacking Your Computer

I've written about hacked Facebook accounts on several occasions. Typically the hacker compromises the user account. Now due to Adobe security vulnerabilities many are getting caught on the wrong side of the tracks when it comes to internet and computer security.

Hacked Facebook accounts are not unusual but Roger Thompson, chief research officer at AVG, says "this is the first time I've seen Facebook applications hacked," and said the firm traced back several Facebook applications that had been hacked, to a Russian site which appears to be taking advantage of the compromised Facebook applications to launch attacks against victims' computers based on unpatched Adobe software vulnerabilities.


Several Facebook apps seem to be vulnerable to the unpatched Adobe software hack. the first encounter was with the application CityFireDepartment. In addition to CityFireDepartment, which AVG is cautioning Facebook users not to visit until "it's cleaned up," Thompson says. Other compromised Facebook applications also include MyGirlySpace, Ferraritone, Mashpro, Mynameis, Pass-it-on, Fillinthe and Aquariumlife.


If your computer does not have the Adobe patch to plug the exploit, and you are using one of these applications, then, it's installing the exploit, initially rogue antispyware but probably also a Trojan," Thompson says. AVG has informed Facebook directly about AVG's findings but he noted it's not simple to identify who maintains each of the Facebook applications.

Thompson has chronicled AVG's findings in a blog item. The attack site, which appears to be in Russia, may also be associated with several other Web-based attacks, he adds.

Original story - www.networkworld.com/nwlookup.jsp?rid=188832

See this post, Save Yourself, Update Your Adobe Acrobat Software! 
to read about the Adobe hacks and how to avoid the attacks.  



The bottom line is;
The Adobe support site is "a little bit" confusing to navigate and determine the right update for your computer and operating system, But... the easiest way to upgrade your copy of Acrobat or Acrobat Reader is to launch the program, Click on the "Help" pull down, and choose "Check for Updates".

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Accept - Your Facebook Profile Is Being Phished

You see it everyday. "Your best friend, John Doe, just took the "This Stupid Quiz. Take the quiz and see how stupid you think it is." This actual quiz may or may not actually exist. I wouldn't doubt it, one bit. The quizzes may be made by anyone, even yourself.

The platform that they are created on, and stored on belong to private companies and Facebook development teams. Their primary intent is to entice you to "Accept" their terms and conditions, which allow them to use your information about you and your friends information.

Wow, do you realize how many times you have put yourself out to the world at large? Each of these quizzes and games may be fun or slightly interesting to you, but rest assured that they are much more interesting to those who accessing your personal information.

My wife, Sharon, seemed skeptical. Last night she was on Facebook. She commented that one of the Ads had gotten her name incorrect. It asked her, "Kristin", with a picture of my wife, if she would like to take the quiz and match it to that of her friend.

She clicked on the ad. She clicked on the "Accept" button, without reading the fine print. Now she is taking the quiz and the software has learned of it's mistake and begin calling her Sharon instead of Kristin. Coincidence? I know that it is not. I have spent my career creating web systems that cache or collect a users information. For the business it is imperative to learn as much about the clientele as possible, in order to provide the most focused advertising and statistics for their clients.

Next time, don't just click "Accept" and go through to the game. Read the fine print. Because I did, I now know why I keep getting advertising for impotence and not women's hygiene products. I know why my face book knows that I am a 47 year old, male, Motley Crew fan.