Facebook Settings

How to Disable Data Share with Search Engines

“What are the differences between Mark Zuckerberg and me? I give private information on corporations to you for free, and I am a villain. Zuckerberg gives your private information to corporations for money and he is Man of the Year”
Julian Assange – editor in Chief of Wikileaks

Among the few things that have gathered more attention than facebook are its infamous privacy settings. On March 2011, Facebook indicated in a letter to Rep. Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Barton (R-TX) that it will go forward with a proposal to provide users’ addresses and mobile phone numbers to third-party application developers. That in itself raises some concerns but according to the latest update to privacy settings, your information can be legally shared with people in your network and with companies which are more than willing to sell you stuff. If you do not take the necessary precautions: your profile picture, your data and your list of friends could be displayed on the next Google search.

In this post we will walk you through the steps to stop sharing your facebook data with search engines.

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A Guide to Making Your Facebook Friend’s List Private

Many of us love to watch our number of Facebook “friends” list grow and grow. Showing off a few dozen, hundred, or thousands of friendships does create a certain sense of popularity and satisfaction. However, that slight bit of popularity can lead to problems for both you and your various friends. Unless your Facebook friendship list is made private, it is possible for marketers to easily see your friend list when they type your name into the Facebook search box. Any unwanted guests can record their names and contact them based on the assumption that you and your friends share similar interests. This can create a wealth of unwanted contact through private messages and strange friend requests for both you and your friends. Whatever your reasons may be–socially acceptable or otherwise–it is a great rule to keep your friend list private–and to send those marketers packing.

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You Can No Longer Browse by Region on Facebook

A few days ago we talked about how you could no longer find dates on facebook using the advanced search feature and searching by relationship status. Facebook is trying to get away from meeting people online. They want the actual meeting of the person to take place offline and the communication to take place online.

Myspace has had some major flaws and facebook is trying to avoid major social networking flaws. However, they are completely nerfing the advanced search feature on facebook. Its power has been dwarfed. Now the search by region has been disabled and completely taken off facebook profile search.

It appears that this lack of a feature is here to stay unfortunately. They seem to be getting rid of all of their features.

Google Launches Official Facebook Profile Page

Just a few weeks ago Google announced the release of official twitter accounts for youtube, blogger, google reader, google apps, and app engine. Now google has launched its official Facebook Fan Page and has gained close to a half million fans. It is being frequently updated and its popularity is rapidly growing. The page, which has already been updated five times this week, and appears to be growing in popularity. So far they are simply reposting what is on their official blog, but reports are in that they will have original and important content on their facebook sit.
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Facebook Removes Searching Based On Relationship Status

Despite all the hot sexy singles ads on facebook, the social networking website has decided to remove the ability to search for facebook users based on their relationship status. The facebook advanced search tool no longer has the search option to find users who are single, in a relationship, it’s complicated or married. This may be for them to be able to promote dating sites better and keep people from attempting to use facebook as a dating site. Luckily for users who have this in mind there are many facebook dating applications. Although Facebook is not a dating plateform many users were using the site to connect with people that they have never met. Myspace has reportedly been used for finding hookups, however, facebook has halted their site as being used to find potential dates. Proably for the same reason, they want their users to use real names and not fake ones like myspace allows.

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Use Friend’s Lists to Protect your Security

One of the must under appreciated secuirty feature / setting in facebook is the friends list. It can do so many things that most facebook users don’t know about. Facebook describes the friends list as a way to manage friends as groups and create privacy rules based on the users personal preferences. You can create a friends list for practically any purpose. You can send mass messages to your friends list. The options are unlimited
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Create Multiple Friends Lists to Customize Privacy

Most people forget about their friends lists when they are trying to secure their facebook. This is something that shouldn’t be overlooked. Many facebook users have hundreds, sometimes even thousands of friends. If you group them all into one category, you are hindering your security. Facebook offers a great tool in the form of allowing their users to tweak each group of friends. This means that the people you meet at parties can be separated from your school study group, which of course can be separated from your co-workers.

You can add each friend to more than one group. This means that you can put a co-worker in your group of sky diving friends and that person can see your album of the company picnic as well as last weeks sky diving adventure.

You can relate friend groups to tags. You can simply tag a group of friends and give them a certain amount of privileges to your account and then tag another group of friends and give them privileges.

Like I said before, friend groups can have a certain amount of privileges attached to them.

You can group people by friends, professional, family etc. You may not want your family and co-workers to see things that your personal friends can see.

Hope this helps.