Facebook Settings - Sharing & Privacy
By Brad Ireland - Oct 2011
I like Facebook as much as the next person, maybe more but I’ve found Facebook at times can become confusing. Facebook have introduced a lot of new features and changed existing ones to better compete against Google+ and Twitter. Some of my friends were unaware of the impact some of these changes had on them so have decided to write about it here. Let me start discussing the Sharing and privacy options. Have you noticed in recent times that when you look at Friends posts that you now have an icon to the right which indicates who you are sharing a Status Update, Photo, Video or Link with. If you haven’t here are some examples
There are three settings Public, Friends and Custom. What does each of these settings mean though? Public means shared with not only all your friends but everyone on Facebook and potentially everyone on the Internet. You see if you have made your Facebook profile viewable by the public (this is everyone on the Internet) anything you share publicly can be seen by people and by the robots that crawl and index the content of websites for search engines like Google. Once indexed your Facebook profile and public content on the profile may show up in search results.
The second sharing option is Friends. This means everyone on your friends list can see what you choose to share with friends. The third option is Custom, using this option you can choose to make a Status Update, Photo, Video or link only visible to you, individual friends, groups of your friends by ysing Facebook lists, Friends of your Friends and the option to show to everyone on you friends except for individuals or groups of friends.
Each of the above choices is represented by the icons shown above.