So you’ve given in to the peer pressure and signed up with Facebook. You’ve hunted down your old high school pals. You suddenly have a strong option on the Pirates v. Ninjas debate. You play Scrabulous Lexulous.It’s great. Everyone is on the Fizzy Bizzy.
But then, you realize…
EVERYONE is on the Fizzy Bizzy. Including your boss. Including your business partners. Including your mom. And they all now can see the Wall posts in which you refer to Gov. Blagojevich as “that douchebag with the piece”.You have three options:
1) Delete your Facebook account and never use the Internets again. This is less than ideal, as you will find yourself completely cut out of modern society and will have no idea what your friends consider the 25 most interesting bits of trivia about themselves.
2) Strip all interesting content from your Facebook. This actually doesn’t solve the problem, as if your sister-in-law tags you in a photo doing a keg stand in Wrigleyville, your manager will still be able to see it.
3) Implement Custom Security Privacy Awesomeness. Hereafter referred to as CSPA, Custom Security Privacy Awesomeness is your solution for being able to be a wild and crazy Facebooker with the people who can handle it, but buttoning-down and synergizing strategic Powerpoints with those who need to see you as someone respectable who doesn’t even know how to pronouce Jagermeister.
The obvious choice is Option 3…CSPA. And luckily for you, I am willing to share these secrets with you, for a lower cost than a ShamWow. That’s right – you can learn to lock down your Facebook for fun and profit (okay, just fun) for free. And I will be your guide.
Instructions, after the jump!
The first step is to determine how you will “break down” your Friends on Facebook. The ideal method is to look at them as security boundries; what are the different “classes” of security that you will want to implement? The easiest way to do this is to limit it to two types; “All Access” and “Restricted”. My setup is a little more complicated, which is what I will use for the illustrations below – but I will refer to the “All Access” and “Restricted” concept if you want to keep it that easy.
For me, I have broken down my Friends to the following groups:
“All Access” – These are the people I trust. The people who can see all my secrets.
“Family” – Self-explanatory. Folks I am related to. At this point, they’re not a security boundary (they have the same rights as “All Access”) but I keep this group in case there ever is a one-off scenario where I would prefer my family-type folks to not see a specific Note, for example.
“HS” – A group that contains people I went to high school or college with. This group has very similar permissions to Family, except that certain restricted contact information may be withheld.
“Professional” – People I work with or who are business partners of mine. This group tends to not see anything juicy.
To create these groups, click on the “Friends” link at the top of the Facebook window. Then, on the left side, click on the button “Make A New List”:
This will prompt you to name your new list. For this one, call it “All Access”.
You now have your new “All Access” list. Do it again and create a list called “Restricted”.
Once you have both of your lists, you can now assign users to them. If you have a lot of friends, this can take a long time. You should still be on the Friends page of Facebook – but you want to see all of your friends (by default, it will display the recent Status Updates). Click on the “Everyone” button:
Once you see your whole Friends list, you will need to go down the list and add each one to the appropriate group. If you look carefully at the right side of each Friend, next to the “X” you will see a little square button. This is the “Toggle” button. Click it.
This brings up the “Extra Friend Detail” view. Notice the little drop-down triangle next to “View Friends”. Click on it.
This allows you to choose a custom group to add this friend to. Pick “All Access” (or “Restricted”, is that is what is appropriate for this friend), and you are done.
Repeat for all the Friends on your list. There’s another way to add friends to a custom list if you’re interested – simply click on the list name, and you can start adding friends just by typing in their name. I prefer the “go down the whole list” method, as it ensures I don’t forget anyone (although if you do the second method, there’s a link for “Add Multiple Friends” that can help with that as well).
Now that you have your Friends all shuffled into their proper groups, it’s time to do some privacy lockdown. Hang on tight, as this is not for the faint of heart and it could take a while.
First, under Settings, click on Privacy:
We’ll start with your Profile privacy.
There are a lot of settings here. We won’t go through all of them, but I will show you how to lock down one, and you can apply the same concept to any other settings.
We’ll start with “Photos Tagged Of You”. Click the little drop-down next to that setting (the default is “Friend of Friends”, I believe), and choose “Customize”
Now this is where it gets tricky. Take a look at the screen that comes up:
You might think “Aha! I know what to do! I will put the ‘Restricted’ group into “Except These People’! I’m so smart!”
Close, but not exactly. Here’s the problem with that system – if you base it upon exclusions, any Friend of yours can see that content until you put them in the Restricted group. What happens if you get a Friend request from someone, and approve it on your smartphone, but don’t get a chance to put them into the Restricted group until a day later? During that entire time, that person has full reign to view all your tequila shot pictures. No good.
So we’ll do it the other way. In the “Some Friends” box, you can type in both individual friends (cumbersome!) or the name of a Friends Group (Facebook doesn’t make this terribly clear). Type in “All Access” in that group and select it.
Once you’ve done it for that setting, you can continue to set up all the different restrictions you would like. Don’t forget that in this screen there are two tabs at the top – “Basic” and “Contact Information”.
You will want to change the settings that exist under both.
You might also want to look at the Privacy settings under the Notes application:
So there you have it. The basics of the CSPA. Of course, there are multiple ways to lock down Facebook, and more issues than just the ones raised here. But hopefully, this will get you started.
How do YOU lock down your Facebook? Tell me in the comments!
