So, like many other Facebook users, I am REALLY annoyed with their recent privacy changes. As an educator who promotes the use of social networking as a valid and very useful learning tool/experience, it makes me angry for Facebook to behave in a way that undermines my efforts to promote a more connected learning environment.
I found the recent NY Times article, How to Opt-Out of Facebook’s Instant Personalization, very helpful. I am also recommending that ALL Facebook users go to the “Account” tab (upper right corner of screen) and click on every setting option to make sure that all of the settings match the user’s personal privacy preferences and needs. While you are in your account settings area of Facebook, you should also click on the option to view what your FB profile looks like to most FB users. This will help you see if your profile settings are set appropriately based on your own needs.
Another important thing to check is how your profile looks to people who are NOT Facebook users. You will need to use a new web browser to do this — one that you have not used recently to log-in to your Facebook profile. For example, I hardly ever use Safari on my Mac. If I pull up my profile page in Safari I am not logged in to Facebook and this allows me to be able to preview what others see if they try to access my FB profile if they are not logged in. Thanks to my personal privacy settings, when someone tries to access my profile URL, they see a message that the page does not exist. 
I know we can’t expect complete privacy in our now very connected world. However, Facebook’s recent changes — changes that require everyone to opt-out rather than just opt-in — is very bad behavior based entirely on $$$. Sadly, most users — especially users who are not super tech-savvy — will not automatically know to check these settings.
I love Facebook. I enjoy reconnecting with old friends, classmates, and with my large, extended family on Facebook. I enjoy connecting with my PLN through Facebook. I just don’t necessarily want all of those connections to visible, accessible, or exploited outside of Facebook.
I have my personal settings configured so that what happens in/on my Facebook stays within Facebook (for the most part) — but I also am careful about what I post within Facebook anyway because I know that at any given time Facebook may change settings that allow some of my information to “leak” out to other parts of the web. Unfortunately, Facebook is NOT Vegas…
Change Agency by Stephanie Sandifer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. You may copy, distribute, transmit and/or remix this content for noncommercial uses as long as you attribute the work to Stephanie Sandifer (with link back to the original post) and agree to license the work under the same or similar license.
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