Facebook Knows Best, Dear (random public settings)

Good Morning, Lovelies!

Facebook has once again decided that it knows what is best for us all. It has been switching people's privacy settings to "public" so that all of their posts have gone public.

This means that 1. everything that you've been saying recently is visible to the entire world and 2. anything that others do in response (liking, commenting) is broadcast wily-nilly to their respective contacts.

What to do about it:
1. Check your posts for a little globe which indicates a public setting. If you see that little globe on your posts, go to https://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy and "limit past posts" to friends only.

2. Before you submit your next post, click the options next to the "post" button and set it to "friends." Doing so will change the setting for that post and all future posts until you change it again.

Facebook Privacy (or not)

Facebook doesn't care about our privacy. It's time that we started to care about each other, then.

Any time that anyone interacts with a public post on Facebook, it shows up in the "news" feed of that person's contacts. No-one has any control over any aspect of this any longer.

Interactions include the following:
* Commenting on a post.
* Liking a post.

Public posts effectively include the following:
* Posts made from personal profiles which are set to "friends-of-friends" or "public."
* Any post on a Page, even those which show up as "customised."
* Any post in an open group.
* Possibly also pinned posts in closed groups.

In the case of commenting, a person's comment is displayed, as well as the post to which the comment was made. Because of this, it is important that people know that their privacy settings impact other people - not just themselves.

It is also worth a person's time and effort to learn how tagging and the privacy of tagged posts and photos impacts one's own privacy.

Fix It, Facebook

Social Fixer's "New Year's Resolutions" wish list for Facebook.

Social Fixer advises Facebook to listen to its users: "Yes, we are the product being sold. But unless you keep users happy, you will soon have no one left to advertise to. Users don’t pay you the money, but they are your customers too."

Among the things that Social Fixer is asking for:

* Fix the damned news feed: "We're not stupid. We know you're just manipulating the content in order to charge Pages and advertisers for their posts to actually be visible to users. And let's face it – your algorithms are terrible. Everyone I talk to is becoming disenchanted with their news feed."

* Stop with the ceaseless changes already: "We like continual improvement, but not constant random tinkering. We don't have time to re-learn how to use Facebook every 2 weeks. It's really annoying."

* Give us more control over privacy. No, more: "You want users to share more and tag more and like more and comment more, because it lets you harvest more data. ... With each update to the privacy settings, you make it more complicated and more difficult to communicate only with those people you wish to. Instead of gathering better personal data by reducing default privacy, you are making people afraid to say anything of substance because they are never sure who will see it."