Daily Dose of Common Sense

Did you find your old boyfriend or girlfriend on Facebook and glance at his/her current personal photos? Yeah, me too. I’m always surprised when users don’t prohibit personal information from being shared outside their network.

Even if you are a casual Facebook user, you should think about your privacy. When signing up to Facebook, you agree that your personal information will be seen by others. But, who sees it and how it is used are up to you. Most members are unaware of the privacy options on Facebook, but it’s increasingly important to familiarize yourself with what happens to your information.

Recently, it was revealed that a third-party application on Facebook was using member pictures in advertising. So, your profile picture could appear in an ad without your consent. For example, a husband saw his wife’s photo on Facebook, only it promoted his wife to him as a “hot single.”

No, you won’t get paid–or even notified–if your picture is used in an ad as a spokesperson for a product or service. But, you can prevent it from happening. To change the settings:

1. Go to Settings
2. Select Privacy Settings
3. Choose “News Feed and Wall”
4. Choose “Facebook Ads” tab
5. There is a menu “Appearance in Facebook Ads.” Select “No one” and save

Here is a link to a great PC World article, “Can Facebook Be Private?” There are some good general privacy tips here, like how to control who sees your pictures and status updates. Also, a lot of the quizzes and applications can use your personal data if you have authorized them to have access to your account. This article will tell you how to see who you’ve given access to and how to delete any unnecessary ones.

Let’s hope everyone–except our old boyfriends and girlfriends–follow some of this advice.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 20th, 2009 at 9:15 pm and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.