Is Facebook still a "friend" to the social media user who values some semblance of privacy? With the advent of Graph Search, Facebook's internal search engine, which allows users to search for comments, photo captions, photos, and other material posted by themselves or anyone else, many Facebook users are feeling that their privacy is a thing of the past, like those other casualties of technology, such as the handwritten letter and the answering machine.
Graph Search makes users uncomfortable for a variety of reasons. For example, your still-smitten ex-boyfriend could type in "posts by [insert your name here] from last year," and see all the mushy evidence of your love before it went sour. A potential employer could type in "photos of [insert your name here] from 2009" and see a plethora of cringe-worthy shots of a scantily-clad, inebriated you during the debauched phase you've since outgrown.
Those who want to continue to enjoy using Facebook without sacrificing what little privacy it still affords can make some adjustments to their account settings that will render them safe from Graph Search...for now. This can be a painstaking and elaborate process, and a basic Google search will turn up some pages with step-by-step instructions. For the meantime, here are a few quick and dirty tips to get you started:
- Go to your activity log and scroll through all of your status updates. Change the audience from "public" to "friends" or "custom" for those posts you no longer want to be seen by everyone. Just delete the posts you no longer want be seen by anyone.
- Navigate to your activity log and review all of your comments. The comments you have made on other people's photos or status updates may be public if those individuals have made those posts public. If you'd rather those comments of yours not be public, you can delete them.
- Review your profile's "About" section. You can edit each sub-section of the "About" section and designate a specific audience-public, friends of friends, friends, custom, only me-for each element.
- Take a look at the privacy settings of your photos and albums. Use the drop-down menu at the top of each photo or album to control who can see it.
If none of these and other suggestions for maintaining privacy on Facebook seem satisfactory, or if you, like many others, are finding the words "privacy" and "Facebook" increasingly at odds, consider doing something downright revolutionary: delete your account. But bear in mind that even doing that will not necessarily clean the Internet of all your Facebook activity.
Food for thought: a fellow Facebook user might have taken a screen shot of any of your status updates or photos, thereby preserving those moments in time, keeping them alive long after you've forgotten, transcended, or deleted them. Handwritten letters may not last forever, but the Internet-or what happens on it-does.
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