Facebook Questions.

[bicker]

Even that is way too trusting, imho. Are you really sure all your Facebook friends can be trusted, not only with regard to their discretion and judgment, but with regard to their conscientiousness and technical know-how regarding the online experience and responsible stewardship of information you share with them, in that regard? Some of my Facebook friends are young nephews and children of friends. I don't place into their hands the ability to share anything that I don't want a young child to be in a position to share.

My friends are an entirely separate group from DS's friends. We don't share an account. DS doesn't have access to my FB account, other than being able to see what is posted on my Wall.

I think you may have misread the message you replied to. I wrote "children of friends" not "friends of children".

Having people you trust being Facebook friends with your children helps keep them safer, to a small extent.

 

[FireDancer]

It is a good idea to treat everything on Facebook, no matter how private it is, like it is public information. In the OP, it seems like the page in question was set to allow friends of friends to view the content. With that setting people whom you don't know can view all of your data if they know anyone you are friends with. This isn't really a security risk as long as you know it and only post information you wouldn't mind these people who are one degree away from you to see.

Keep in mind that services like Facebook can change their privacy policy at any time and something that is private today can become public tomorrow without you actually doing anything. Sometimes this is by design and sometimes it is because an error was made on the server side. All it takes on many sites is a mistake in the robot.txt file and all of a sudden Google has just indexed all of your data.

It is a good idea, IMO, to only put information you would put on a billboard next to the highway on Facebook no matter what your privacy settings are just in case. I also only post something I wouldn't mind all of my friends seeing whether they are my real life friends, real life family, or just people I know online.

Remember, anything you put on the Internet will be sitting out there somewhere forever. That being said, people are way too paranoid about being "found" online. As long as the only information you have online is not secret who really cares if people find it. The phone book that has been delivered door to door for decades has had as much or more private information in it as most people's Facebook does.

I was TRYING to figure out if I could tag DS in photos and have ONLY those pics visible to his friends without them being able to see my whole album. If that IS possible, I can't figure out how to do it.

The way to do that is set up a separate photo album with those tagged photos in it and set only that album to have "friends of friends" as the permission setting. The rest of your photos will still be friends only.

 

[jackskellingtonsgirl]

I think you may have misread the message you replied to. I wrote "children of friends" not "friends of children".

Having people you trust being Facebook friends with your children helps keep them safer, to a small extent.

I was a little confused by the first reply. I do trust my FB friends to some extent. If I didn't trust them, I would not add them as friends. I don't post anything all that interesting, so the info I am sharing on FB isn't anything that would be a problem if it was posted publicly.

DS and I do have some mutual friends - family members, mostly.

FireDancer - In the end I just uploaded the pics to DS's FB account. It was more time consuming than just tagging him in my albums, but oh well. Probably the same amount of labor involved as loading the pics to a separate album in my account.

 

[bicker]

It is a good idea to treat everything on Facebook, no matter how private it is, like it is public information.

That advice could be applied more generally. Practically everything that is ostensibly "private" these days, isn't. Perhaps our best approach would be to present practically nothing that we wouldn't be concerned about others knowing we presented.

 

[scrapquitler]

Here is a recent example. My DD is friends with a mom of one of her friends. The mom is friends with her niece. The niece is set up as friends only. She is really picky about her FB and keeps her privacy settings tight.

The niece went to a concert and had her picture taken with the band. It is a band DD loves. The mom wanted my DD to see the picture so she commented on the picture and DD was able to go to the mom's account and view the picture.

The mom insists that the niece is set up as friends only. Maybe there are glitches in the system? This isn't the only example we have had.

Privacy settings for photo albums are separate from those of the 'wall'. And you can have each of your photo albums set differently.

 

[FireDancer]

That advice could be applied more generally. Practically everything that is ostensibly "private" these days, isn't. Perhaps our best approach would be to present practically nothing that we wouldn't be concerned about others knowing we presented.

"Privacy is dead, get over it." - Scott McNealy (former CEO of Sun Microsystems).

He took a lot of flack for it but even his biggest detractors pretty much agreed that he was at least partially right.