Two new Facebook privacy issues: If you act now, you can photo-stalk your ex and save yourself from Google indexing
Two new Facebook privacy issues have made their way onto my radar. I took advantage of one glitch to stalk peruse off-limits photo albums. Though most Facebook users have been made aware of the fact that the new privacy settings default to be quite open, many have not realized that this applies to their photo albums too.
That means, if you act fast, you can probably check out the photo albums of the ex who has defriended you or put you on limited profile. A *friend* of mine confirms this is possible…
This applies if the person made the privacy transition and has not yet realized that Facebook has automatically set their photos to the “Let basically everyone in the world see these!” setting.
To fix this problem, you have to go into “Application Settings” and then into the settings for your “Photos.”
That’s confusing, right? Right! Facebook has really f***ed up this whole making-privacy-control-easier thing.
The second problem in the new privacy settings is that Facebook is letting search engines index content from the site. Yeah, you’re going to want to turn that off.
To do that, you DO head to privacy settings. Then choose “Search.” There you’ll find a new little option: “Public Search Results: Allow search engines to access your publicly available info and any information visible to Everyone.”
Like me, you’ll probably want to uncheck “Allow Indexing.”
These new settings are so confusing that even the company’s CEO seems to be confused by them. Unlike Ryan Tate at Gawker, I don’t think the company is evil. I just think their developers may be a few photos short of an album.
Facebook, you’re like an abusive partner, making it harder and harder for me to love you. Unlike tech writer Dan Gillmor, I’m not ready to leave you yet.
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Kashmir Hill, Tweets Tube. Tweets Tube said: Two new Facebook privacy issues: If you act now, you can photo-stalk your ex and save yourself from Google inde.. http://bit.ly/5coBQP [...]
The main issue is facebook thinks that because you are willing to share your information with 100s of “friends” you must be open to sharing them with “everyone” also. People like me who use facebook to share information with mostly friends and relatives that live in different states are totally against sharing information with “everyone”. It worries me that the company thinks this is even a good option for some individual users. “Everyone” sharing is good for companies and public figures but should not be an option for private individuals.
[...] about this one, because it’s always displayed some data for search engines, by default, and suddenly people are noticing. That’s why when you go to change your settings under Settings/Privacy Settings/Search, [...]
[...] about this one, because it’s always displayed some data for search engines, by default, and suddenly people are noticing. That’s why when you go to change your settings under Settings/Privacy Settings/Search, [...]
[...] about this one, because it’s always displayed some data for search engines, by default, and suddenly people are noticing. That’s why when you go to change your settings under Settings/Privacy Settings/Search, [...]