Kory Hurst

Warning: This is kind of dated. Most of this is lost with the switch to “Timeline”.

Here is a not bad tutorial, but it is a little dated, and not as comprehensive as I would like. So I will take a crack at it.

Facebook is great, but their privacy policy is not. I won’t go into it more here, as there are lots of people and article that already do. All I will tell you how to do here is to set up your facebook privacy properly. Unfortunately, getting anything to work the way you want takes alot of effort.

Create “Groups” for your Friends
Why: As soon as you have more than dozen friends, it gets pretty difficult to manage privacy without groups. Like a lot of things in life, and especially computing, there are many ways to approach this. Typically most people start off with groups like “high school friends” or “people from (my current city)”. This is alright, but often you have different relationships with people within groups of that nature. I prefer to make groups by relationship. Think of “Family”, “Coworkers”, “Neighbours” and “Best Friends”. Things like that. You tend to want to share the same kind of information with people grouped that way. You will have to fine to the resolution of the groups later, or rearrange the people in them once you start using them, but that is fine. One last note, people can belong to many groups, so you are not giving up the ability to send a message to your “Hockey Buddies”. Furthermore, you may want to put people in multiple security groups, but it starts to get a bit confusing when you do.
How:

• Account –> Edit Friends
• In the left hand panel click “Friends” (or any existing item under the “Lists” heading
• Click “Create New List” in the bar above your friends
• Give the name a list in the box provided (you may want to use a prefix to identify it as a security list)
• Select the friends for the list by clicking on them and scrolling, or by typing names in the box provided

Set Privacy Basics

Why: The big issue with the most recent changes to FB is changes in the default privacy settings to these basics.
How:

• Account –> Privacy Settings
  Note: You can now see the default that caused the big stir. See how the bullets
  work their way from left to right? You want them all to be in the right 2 columns.
• Click “Customize Settings”
• For simplicity scroll to the bottom we will start there
• Beside mobile phone, click the drop down box on the right that says “Friends”
  Note: The default choices are “Everyone”, “Friends of Friends” and “Friends Only”. The first 2 are largely
  indistinguishable. If you have a hundred friends who each have a hundred friends, then “Friends of Friends”
  is 10,000 people. To me, that is pretty much everyone. “Friends Only” you can use some places, but not here.
• Click “Customize”
• You are now presented with the standard dialog box for privacy control
• For this particular item (Mobile phone) select only me from the dialog box
  Note: Really you should do this and ensure that mobile phone is not filled in, but we will come to that later, or have already covered it.
  This is just for added security.
• Click “Save Setting”
• Repeat this for the other items under contact information
  Note: Your important friends and family already know your contact information. If they
  don’t, or someone else wants it, they can send you a message in FB requesting it.
• Move up to the next section “Things others share”
• Beside “Photos and Videos I’m Tagged in click the privacy settings dropdown box and select “Customize”