The one about privacy on Facebook is a much-debated issue that has become hot again with the launch of Graph Search. How do we protect photos, personal information, and content posted on the social network now that a simple search can unmask actions we wanted to keep hidden or otherwise restricted to a circle of friends, or can trigger misunderstandings? The news of alleged spying by Facebook is baloney, and protecting information is dead simple.
Alarmists are rioting on the web, accusing Facebook of spying on people and introducing one more tool to understand our personal secrets. In fact, this social networking platform is seen as a tool for minding other people’s business, a kind of gossip 2.0: “Did you see who liked her and how fat she looks in that picture?” It is true that many users use the social network for this purpose, but Facebook does not care about the Personal information of the individual person. The goal is to do business, not to see how well Aunt and Caius look together who just made their engagement official to the social world.
Graph Search is not just one more tool to spy on people in defiance of their privacy, but it serves to keep users nailed to the social network and enhance the Facebook Ad s sold to advertisers. In fact, if a user were to find useful information on this platform, he or she would no longer need to look for it elsewhere. After all, it is with such reasoning that Mark Zuckerberg built his billion-dollar empire.
So it is not the violation of individual privacy that is Facebook’s goal. For this very reason, it happened to many people today that after logging in, a notice appeared inviting them to check their privacy settings. To get access to this part, just click in the lock icon in the top right bar that also includes the name of the person who logged in. Following the paths, one finds a page with three suggestions for privacy in Graph Search searches. These are three pointers that I will summarize briefly in this article.
- The first video explains how to make content private, or how to restrict its viewing to certain circles of friends. This applies to everything you publish: posts, personal information, photos, or anything else. It is simple: if the world appears next to the content, it means it is public; by clicking on that icon you can restrict viewing rights.
- The second video explains how to manage the photos on Facebook . Are you being tagged in an inappropriate photo? You can simply remove the tag or hide it from your journal and timeline. But the photo will continue to circulate on the network with the privacy settings set by the owner. The other option is to ask for it to be removed permanently. To do this, just click on Options under the photo and then on Remove/Report Photo.
- Finally, it is possible to check the posts about us in the activity log.
By following these tips, only content that we want to be visible to certain people will be able to end up in Graph Search results. We should not be afraid of Facebook or Graph Search because they are not interested in minding our business. Instead, we must pay attention to other users using the social network (many are real snoopers), carefully set general privacy settings and individual content settings.
