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Email a FriendPosted by Mom of 6 (11 & under) on Tuesday, Mar 9, 2010 11:37 AM (EDT):
I appreciate you last paragraph pointing out the benefits of FB. The family has benefited from FB in our home.
How to Protect Your Privacy on Facebook
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Posted by Melissa Wiley in Reviews on Tuesday, March 09, 2010 10:00 AM
One of my 14-year-old daughter’s presents this Christmas was her own Facebook page. With so many of her cousins on Facebook — cousins who live clear on the other side of the continent — we wanted her to be a part of the extended family conversation.
But we’re cautious parents, protective of our kids’ privacy and safety. Facebook’s privacy settings can be a pain for people of any age to navigate, but it’s worth taking the time to figure them out.
Profile Privacy
Where to start: your Facebook profile.
• In the top right corner of your screen, click “Account.”
• Click “Profile Information.”
• Now select the degree of access you want to allow for your profile info, status updates, photo albums, and more—everyone, only friends, friends of friends, or a custom setting listing individual names.
Recommended setting for kids’ accounts: “Only friends” or create a customized list of specific family members and friends.
Be sure to check the other Facebook privacy categories as well: Contact Information (have kids keep this minimal), Applications and Websites, and Search.
Friend requests and suggestions
Facebook will frequently offer to “help you connect with friends” if you’ll enter your email address and password. This is not a good idea for kids, on any social network. If granted access, Facebook will search your child’s email contacts and look for addresses associated with other Facebook users. This may result in a string of “friend suggestions.” These can be ignored, but kids are likely to jump eagerly at any friend suggestion.
On Facebook, a friend suggestion is not the same thing as a friend request — a suggestion means Facebook thinks you might know this person and is notifying you in case you want to invite the person to be your friend. A friend request means the other person is asking to be your friend.
Parents should talk to their children about being very selective when accepting or requesting “friendships” in any social network. It’s OK to hit that “ignore” button!
Facebook friend suggestions can occur even if the child does NOT share her email password. Suppose a teen has friended both of her parents on Facebook. (Great!) Now suppose both parents are Facebook friends with, say, Dad’s freshman year roommate, Horse McBeerbelly. He’s a great guy, but they haven’t seen him in 20 years and he’s never met their kids. Does he need to be their teenage daughter’s Facebook friend? No. Does he even want to be? Probably not. But because two of the teen’s “friends” (Mom and Dad) share this other contact, Facebook may “suggest” Horse as a friend for the teen. If the girl follows the suggestion, then she’ll be the one sending a friend request to Mr. McBeerbelly. He may feel he needs to accept it, just to be polite—and now suddenly the teen can see all his status updates, which are perhaps not appropriate for a young girl.
So: in a nutshell, discourage your kids from following up on Facebook’s friend suggestions.
One more place to watch kids’ privacy on Facebook: the games. Many FB games have a social or chat aspect. For example, on Farm Town, you can go harvest crops at your friends’ farms. When you do this, a chat window opens and you can converse while you harvest. All the people harvesting at your farm at one time can see each other in the chat window. Once I was playing Farm Town and two of my mom friends were there harvesting my sunflowers. The conversation turned to birth stories. All of a sudden my young nephew, who loves to earn extra gold harvesting my crops, appeared on my farm—and in the chat window. It took a few minutes for my friends to realize he was there, and of course they didn’t know who he was or that he was a child. I had to do some hasty interrupting before my nephew found out more about uterine prolapse than any 12-year-old boy wants to know!
So: if your kids play games on Facebook, be aware that they could wind up in chat situations with strangers.
What about your privacy, Mom and Dad?
One legitimate complaint many people have about Facebook is that it jumbles together people from all the various corners of your life—coworkers and cousins, high school friends and next door neighbors. You don’t necessarily want everyone you know to see every update you post.
Fortunately, you can decide exactly who sees each photo, link, and status update you post on your Facebook page.
Right below your status update entry box is a little padlock icon. Click on that, and you’ll see options for who can see the update you’re about to post: everyone; friends of friends; only friends; or customize.
With the customize option you can select individual names (as few or as many as you wish), or you can select from the Friends lists you have created. For example, perhaps you want to post a photo of your children, but you only want family to see it. Created a “family” list on your Friends page and click the lock icon to select Customize—Family when you go to post the photo.
This is great for people like my hubby, who has many work contacts on Facebook and doesn’t necessarily want them seeing every little smart-alecky comment he posts to members of his family, or vice versa.
Choose a default setting by clicking Accounts—Profile—and scroll down to Posts by Me. Since kids (heck, and adults too) are likely to forget to customize for each new update, make sure the default setting is Only Friends. (We did that in the first step, above.)
Facebook privacy recap:
Set all privacy settings to “Only friends.”
Don’t share email passwords or pay attention to friend suggestions.
Accept friend requests selectively. (Stay up-to-date on who your kids Facebook friends are.)
Be aware of chat options in Facebook games.
Use the padlock icon to select which friends will see which updates.
Having walked our teen through these privacy ground rules, my husband and I feel comfortable about our daughters’ Facebook activity. I love that she is able to keep in touch with certain faraway friends and relatives this way.
I know some folks have concerns about a kind of superficiality to Facebook relationships, but I don’t think these “friendships” (the word takes a lot of flak these days) have to be superficial. What I’m seeing in our family is three generations of people sharing photos, banter, and news with each other. That’s worth every minute I spent figuring out the privacy settings.
Comments
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Posted by Emily on Tuesday, Mar 9, 2010 4:18 PM (EDT):
I too appreciate the paragraph about the good in Facebook. I am currently working on a proposal to my staff about ways to catechize / evangelize using a Facebook Fan Page.
Posted by Louise on Tuesday, Mar 9, 2010 1:30 PM (EDT):
I am wondering about the whole “unfriending” thing. Sometimes you either wish you hadn’t accepted a friend request, or maybe you just have too many “friends” and you want to simplify your facebook experience. Any advice, opinions?
Posted by Rae on Tuesday, Mar 9, 2010 2:28 PM (EDT):
I don’t understand how too many friends could be a problem since the news feed allows you to hide updates from friends that you’re not interested in.
When you do unfriend people they are not informed and must deliberately seek you out to realize that they no longer have access to your information. But the rules of etiquette for this seem to vary a lot. For m ost people who got accounts when facebook was a student thing, unfriending seems to simply be understood. But for those who were parents of college students it sometimes amounts to a social issue along the lines of not inviting someone to the huge annual Christmas party. I have no idea what the significance is for those who fall in between the two groups. I suspect that “do unto others” applies here as it does anywhere else.
Posted by Kansas Mom on Tuesday, Mar 9, 2010 3:16 PM (EDT):
I “unfriended” a bunch of old college acquaintances recently. I was concerned with not really wanted to share so much information with them and also wanted my home screen to show only the people I cared about the most. It was really just an effort to limit my online networks a bit more. I probably unfriended half of my list of friends (maybe 100 of an original 200) and of all those people only one single person has contacted me asking to be a friend again. (I accepted.)
I think most people won’t even notice if you unfriend them. If they do and contact you again you can always say it was a mistake and friend them again (if you like).
No one can tell if you’ve unfriended them or ignore their request.
Now I mostly ignore new friend requests. I try to be very selective in my friends. And I don’t even post to Facebook very often. (Mostly I’m on it to keep up with my sister and sister-in-law.)
Hi Louise—
I have way too many friends in some respects because I used FB last year to reach out to as many homeschoolers as possible in order to create a homeschool conference for our area. The good thing is the random nature of the Home page actually keeps me mostly seeing the people I’m most interested in (I think it tracks where I’ve posted a response before) but sometimes throws in a fresh face.
So if you hide the games and unfriend the problems you won’t have too many and you just delete the things that are posted that you don’t want everyone to see. (I think of it as a chalk board.)
Posted by sarah on Tuesday, Mar 9, 2010 3:03 PM (EDT):
My dd is on Facebook (with every security measure under the sun) and it has been great for her - new friends (children of my friends), fun games. But we have had to be careful. For a while there she was pestered by a stranger - an adult woman - who kept sending repeated friend requests. We ignored them and finally she went away. But the problem was that we could not find any button to “ignore” or “report for spam” this person without first clicking through in a way that seemed to lead us to automatically accepting her request. Hmm.
Posted by Ann Fitch on Tuesday, Mar 9, 2010 4:58 PM (EDT):
I deactivated my Facebook page after it was used to try and send me a virus. Something else to be on the lookout for, and warn your kids about. This particular virus was a pop-up that claimed my computer was “infested” and that I should click on the supplied antivirus button. This screen was made to look like an actual MS screen, but, if you did click on it, it would install the virus. Part of the scary part was that the link came through as an email to me from someone who was one of my FB friends, so, it looked legitimate.
Posted by Hating Facebook! on Tuesday, Mar 9, 2010 6:06 PM (EDT):
How can I keep my privacy with Facebook when I don’t even have an account! And don’t plan to any time in the future!
I had a new baby boy, and we were SO THRILLED! I called my mom and brother and told them around midnite after I delivered.
I didn’t get to go home for 1 1/2 days. Then I got on the phone and called my step-dad and bio dad and sister (step-sister) to share our great news and you know what!? They already KNEW about my baby boy because my sister in law put it on her FACEBOOK page!
I was really upset about it and started crying because I was disappointed about not being the first one to tell them. But the worst part was that they were *mad at me* for not telling them sooner, and angry, AT ME that it was on her Facebook page….what gives?
I did NOT give anyone permission to write about me, nor my family and here is Facebook totally “screwing” with my life. I am MAD!
Now, after a couple of weeks, my step-dad and his wife, and my step-sister haven’t called or sent a card/gift or anything.
I am still mad, but I did confront my sister and brother and they apologized.
I don’t understand how I am to blame for this when I didn’t even know about it.
Why couldn’t they just have said, “Congratulations!” and left it at that?????
Is it normal to have to tell everyone in your life not to share about you and your family? Since when?
Posted by Jay on Tuesday, Mar 9, 2010 6:57 PM (EDT):
Wow.
First, I don’t think your mom and brother posted to be malicious. They most likely posted because they were happy for you and wanted to share with their friends and family so they would be happy for you too. Maybe they should have asked, but I think you’re overreacting.
Second, your step-dad, dad, and step-sister are also overreacting if they won’t talk to you now, but I don’t think you handled this well. A good response would have been, I’m so sorry I didn’t get to tell you in person, after the first phone call(s) to my mom and brother I just couldn’t do anymore right away and wanted to wait until I was home to call you so we could really talk. Not knowing more about your family dynamic it’s hard to guess at why you wouldn’t have told them right away too, but in my family if once you call one person, you have to call everyone or feelings are hurt because you left someone out.
Frankly, your mention of no card or gift makes it sound like that’s the reason you’re upset. Which is beyond petty, and not really a Facebook issue at all.
Finally, you’ve learned a lesson—if you’re telling people something that you don’t want on FB, just say so. That may just be the safest approach now.
Posted by Hating Facebook! on Tuesday, Mar 9, 2010 7:44 PM (EDT):
Jay, yes, I probably didn’t handle it well, and I did tell them I had just gotten home from the hospital. The gift/card thing? That is why I have all of these kids—for the loot==(heavy sarcasm)
Yeah if I were fishing for that, I would be pretty petty, but no phone call either? They have always checked in/sent something/sent a card after our other childrens’ births, so I guess they are still mad. Whatever. I still feel like they could have given me the benefit of the doubt, dont you?
Posted by E on Tuesday, Mar 9, 2010 11:32 PM (EDT):
Hating Facebook (HF), I feel your pain somewhat. Jay, thanks for the advice you offered too.
I recently had a baby, and luckily one friend asked us if we minded if she posted a photo of our daughter on her Facebook page for the rest of our young adult group to see. My husband and I thanked her for asking, and said that we DID mind - we preferred not to have any information about us/our daughter online.
This began a (probably ongoing, I bet) effort on my husband’s and my part to let all our families/friends know that we do not have Facebook pages and we would prefer photos/details of our lives not be posted on other peoples’ Facebook pages. FH, I think you need to just start having the conversation with people.
Seems like many people who do have Facebook really communicate that way often and think it’s abnormal not to. It becomes the “assumed preferred method of communication” and since it is not YOUR preferred method, you just have to stick up for yourself.
Even though you’re not really in the wrong here, in my opinion - maybe you can just apologize to your family who are mad at you, chalk up your reaction to hormones or whatever, and start over. Turn the other cheek, you know? Jesus will be happy you smoothed things over and chose to be a peacemaker, not a grudge-holder. : )
And to all the Facebook users, remember us folks who are “old school” and not on Facebook. ; ) We recently found out about a friend’s new baby because another friend saw it on the Facebook page and told us. So, that was third-hand news and it originally came from Facebook. Talk about feeling impersonal when such a big occasion is exciting news and we want to know and celebrate! It made me sad that the friends didn’t tell us themselves, (even a mass email would have been better than third-hand Facebook), but I guess the world is changing…
Posted by Anon on Wednesday, Mar 10, 2010 12:47 AM (EDT):
Good question about keeping our privacy on another person’s facebook page. I joined Facebook simply to keep in contact with one good friend who moved across the country. A few people I knew “found” me and I accepted. Then someone says I need some pics. I rarely get to my page but by the time I did my sister had jumped on and said since I obviously wasn’t getting to it she would put pics of my family on HER page! I called her immediately and told her I DON’T WANT pics of my family out there. While she doesn’t have a problem with it herself, thankfully she did respect my wishes. But, that gets me thinking…..other people’s pictures from parties, reunions, etc.
Posted by Laurie Marr on Tuesday, Mar 9, 2010 11:58 PM (EDT):
I have my daughter’s facebook assigned to an old email address of mine that only comes to MY email box, so I am the one who gets the notices, requests and even what is said to her in her fb message inbox. That usually happens before she is online so I would be able to jump on her page if needed.
Posted by sofablue on Wednesday, Mar 10, 2010 2:59 AM (EDT):
I think it is ridiculous that people feel that some kind of protocol was not followed. FB is a quick way to let everyone know, and while your sister in law should have let you make the grand announcement, the rest of the family are the ones being petty. Here is a joyous occasion, and the child is not being welcomed for some imagined slight. I hope things get resolved quickly, and let this be a lesson to us all that people have the right to share their own news.
Recently, I was talking to my brother and catching up on the family. Some things I knew because I am FB friends with his daughters, but I felt funny saying very much about it, since they refuse him as a friend. No way would my kids refuse me. They were the ones that got me involved in the first place! There is a whole new level of etiquette here.
Posted by Funny Pictures on Wednesday, Apr 14, 2010 9:07 PM (EDT):
Facebook killed privacy on the internet! How can you have privacy on Facebook?
Posted by Funny Pictures on Wednesday, Apr 14, 2010 9:09 PM (EDT):
Facebook killed privacy on the internet! How can you have privacy on Facebook?
Posted by Funny Pictures on Wednesday, Apr 14, 2010 9:10 PM (EDT):
Facebook killed privacy on the internet! How can you have privacy on Facebook?
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