Florian Seroussi's Blog

Facebook Privacy. You don’t need to quit.

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

Half of my feeds is about Facebook and their privacy policy. A complete case of propaganda built up by the blogo-journalistic cartel. Few thousands of top self proclaimed internet right activists are trying to convince 300 Million users that their life is ‘exposed’ by Facebook voluntary exploitation of public data.

Facebook offers a wide selection of options to protect your info and we will go through those steps a bit later. But let’s not be hypocrite here, if you want to keep your life private you need to stay away from social networks. Permanently.

Those attacks are becoming more targeted against Mark Zuckerberg like an attempt to stop the ascension of a giant. The worst is to come after I read the upcoming release of a movie describing Facebook’s founder as a drunk billionaire geek who is a sex-mad “borderline-autistic” conniver.

Mike Arrington wrote an excellent note on the subject but personally I think Zuck will have to face the same hatred Jobs and Gates faced decades ago. Hopefully genius will prevail.

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Now here is how you can simply protect some level of privacy on Facebook.

Simply login to your account and head to ‘Privacy Settings’

Once you get there click on ‘Personal Information and Posts’

This will give you access to a set of customizable features. For best protection chose ’only friends’ to all options.

I personally do not accept wall posts. If a friend has something to say he can:

-       send me a message or – comment one of my entries.

Finally you can opt-out from public searches meaning search engines will not display your Facebook profile

One last recommendation – be sure to set privacy settings on applications and games. You surely don’t want to share your recent activity across the board:

Be curious and explore those pages. You will find lots of useful information.

The only valid reproach we can aim at Facebook is the lack of universal control of privacy [windows way for security] where user can set level of data sharing from None to Public in one click.

Tags: arrington, facebook, movie, privacy, settings, zuckerberg
Posted in Entrepreneur, Social Media, TechCrunch, Technology, facebook | 3 Comments »