Boy, there's a great question. That's something that I've actually
considered spending a lot more time on in the form of articles. The problem
that I have in doing that is that about the time I decide here's how to use
Facebook safely, Facebook goes in and changes all of their privacy settings and
everything that I would have recommended has gone by the wayside and no longer
applies.
So, I'm not going to give a detailed response to this one because it is way
more complex than just a simple answer can give you.
I will say a couple of things: one, definitely spend some time looking at
Facebook's privacy options. Let's see; let's go have a look at my Facebook
account. I don't think there's anything scary here. So here's Facebook.
Where you want to be spending some time is over here at the Privacy
Settings. You really want to be careful about how things get shared. It is very
easy for things to be shared more publicly than you think. In other words, the
biggest mistake that people make is thinking that sharing only with Friends
keeps things private. It does not. Friends, in turn, can reshare what you have
shared and they can then share it publicly. That is one of the ways that
mistakes happen.
So without getting into all of the specific settings because there's a bunch
as you can see. How you connect and all of a sudden and you've got a long list
of what people can see and who can do what; whether you can be tagged or your
are blocked. There's a bunch of stuff there; spend a few minutes with that and
go through those things and make sure you understand them and that they are not
more permissive than you would want them to be.
I will say, and I have to quote, and I'll actually have to mangle the quote
because it wasn't 'PG' when he said it, my friend and tech pundit Chris
Pirillo posted some time ago, 'If there's stuff you don't want people to see,
don't post it online.'
It's actually very simple.
It is simply much too easy for information posted online to be shared with
or make it outside the circle you think you've shared it with. The safest thing
to do is of course - don't.
The other piece of advice I will give you in respect to Facebook is to avoid
apps - avoid them. Every time an app comes up it asks me for permission to post
on my wall or to see my friends or do any of those kinds of things, I almost
immediately turn them off because I just don't have the time to vet every
single app that's out there. And each one is a potential place for leakage,
data leakage, or inadvertently having things happen that you don't want to have
happen.
I actually follow a couple of interesting folks. Malwarebytes has a page and
I recommend them. Let me go over to the Ask Leo! page because I would recommend
also Hoax-Slayer and Sophos. Both of those as being pages you want to favorite
or 'Like', excuse me, or visit from time to time.
The reason I point those out specifically is because those two, among others
I'm sure, do a very good job of giving up-to-date information about the latest
hoaxes and there are a ton of hoaxes on Facebook.
If you don't choose to follow these, then by all means, remember the old
adage 'If it's too good to be true, then it's probably not true.' But there
just a bunch of hoaxes running around all the time. Typically, the hoax turns out
to be fake, they promise something they don't deliver, but along the way, they try
to gather information about you; they try and get you to fill out some surveys,
they try to do all sorts of random stuff that's not worth it.
If you want to, I would recommend going over to those two pages and liking
them.
'It's not about being seen, it's about being tracked.'
It depends about your level of paranoia. Just using Facebook allows Facebook
to see know what you're doing; there's no way around that. The websites that
you use, you are exposing to them your information, your posts, everything you
do with them. If you don't want Facebook to track you; if you don't want
Facebook to have access to that information, don't use Facebook.
When it goes beyond Facebook, that basically, I reiterate my recommendation
to avoid giving apps more permission than you are really comfortable giving to
those apps. I don't want Farmville or Mafia Wars, I don't want them to be able
to paste on my wall - I just don't. I don't want to clutter people who are
following me, I don't want them to have to see this stuff that's coming along
because I happen to do something in an application.
So that's the kind of stuff that I typically recommend that people
avoid.