How to Protect your Facebook Photos and Content and Avoid Getting into Hot Water
Friday, January 9th, 2009
There are two things the media knows will get an audience: a Facebook/MySpace story and Madeline McCann. It’s a fact of life. Facebook because people identify with it readily and everybody loves a story about a cock-up as well as it being easy pickings for journalists. If you need to know why Madeline McCann is also guaranteed to draw an audience you must have only recently returned from your extended holiday on Jupiter.
The essential problem with Facebook-related stories is that it is all too easy for anybody to go in and see your photos unless you actively protect them and restrict who can see them. The best way to do this is by setting up some Lists. I’ll use my own settings as an example.
Lists are a way to organise your friends based on whatever arbitrary names you like. I’ve called one of mine “Circle of Trust” and another “I Don’t Think We’ve Met…” If somebody wants to add me as a friend and they are somebody I like and would trust with a photo of me dressed in inappropriate attire I will add them to the former. However, increasingly I find people popping up who I have never met and so they go into the latter list
To get started with Lists you need to click on the Friends tab at the top of your Facebook page. On the left-hand side of the site will be a button that looks like this:
Clicking that button is your first step on the road to privacy paradise. As if by magic you will be prompted to name your new list. Give it something memorable. Then press ‘Enter’ when you’ve finished. Now all you need to do is start typing the names of the people you want to add to your list. Keep going until satisfied.
Once you’ve got a list to be proud of you can now start to shape your privacy preferences and decide who gets to see your white bits and who gets to read what you’ve been up to lately. To get started, hover your mouse over the ‘Settings‘ option at the top of your Facebook page and wait for the Privacy Settings option to reveal itself and then click on it. Then click on “Profile” and behold the glory.
All those drop-down boxes let you shape every aspect of your profile’s contents. Click on the Profile drop-down-box and then choose Customise to see just how much you can restrict your general profile information. This determines whether Joe Public can see your profile or not. The following drop-down-boxes control specific areas of your profile.
The one you want to pay particular attention to is the one entitled “Photos Tagged of You”
By restricting your photos to trusted lists of people you can keep unwated eyes from gazing upon your naval or your fancy dress costume. Of course, this still comes with a warning about making sure the people you add to your list are trustworthy in the first place.
Lastly, we are going to deal with what you should do if somebody you are not familiar with wants to add you as a friend. Back in the day you were discouraged from adding anybody at all if you didn’t know them very well, but in a short space of time Facebook has moved on from that and adding a “friend” no longer has to be somebody you would trust. This is not helped by the “Friends you may know…” tool. I get about 3 requests per week through this and turn most of them down.
If you really have to add somebody to your friends list that you don’t know then simply make sure you add them to a list for that kind of person. Call it “Do I know You?” or something similar and make sure you add the right people to it. It’s important that this list does not have permission to view your intimate photos and should only be able to access basic information about you.
This article was written for YBF by Mike Rouse who runs a full-service design agency with a specialism in politics, media and campaigning. You can read the Rouse Media blog for more practical tips at http://blog.rousemedia.eu/
Isn’t this even more ghastly than the chap from Keele who did this in the first place? What I mean is, rather than offering the advice “Don’t do this sort of rubbish in the first place?”, you offer “Do it but here’s how to hide the tracks.”
This is exactly the sort of thing ConHome gets into hot water for – instead of “Let’s be on the centre-right and govern for the whole country” we get “Let’s be vulgar Reaganites but here’s how to con our way back with a veneer of acceptability.” May work in 2010 but will backfire, just like any CF chairman hiding his Facebook photos.
[...] going to use Facebook to post pictures and messages, ensure only real friends can see them. The YBF site has some good advice on this; [...]
LA has a simple way not to fall into this trap. Do not behave like an out and out prat. Then no photos will exist.
LA may well have, and still does have, his drunken moments. LA has been to many a fancy dress party. LA hates political correctness.
If however you are going to place yourself in the public eye a certain level of common sense needs to be used.
Photos of drunken behaviour may cause a minor stir, but anything that is premeditated when sober and seriously crass is just stupid and will bring on a storm,and end a career.
LA says enjoy oneself, but if you want to take the limelight, there are sacrifices.
[...] recent events within Conservative Future, the Tory Party’s youth wing, Mike Rouse has penned some advice as to how the protect yourself online, especially on Facebook, which activists might want to familiarise themselves with [...]
To WHS @ 11:00pm: I thought it would go without saying that you shouldn’t be engaging in any acts like this in the first place.
The point is that sometimes these issues arise out of youthful indiscretion and the fear of a Facebook photo surfacing at some point in the future should not stop young people from enjoying their youth.
A photo of a kid out on the town with his mates should not have to come back to haunt him when going for an interview or selection 3-5 years down the line. By protecting these areas a young person can ensure that potential employers, selection panels and the like do not get to see a photo of them that could easily be taken out of context and cause the candidate any prejudice.
[...] newspaper in the UK. At the time, YBF blogged about the dangers of Facebook, and also advised on how to keep it private. It appears that another high profile figure in UK student politics failed to take that advice, and [...]