Managing your Facebook privacy with public pages

If you’d like to have more con­trol over your pri­vacy on Face­book, it isn’t easy. I’ve had sev­eral friends ask me how they can make their Face­book pro­files and pages more pri­vate, and I’ve been strug­gling to do this for my own Face­book account. Face­book is going to roll out an updated pri­vacy set­tings tool tomor­row, so I’m focus­ing on how to use pub­lic pages and other tech­niques to pro­tect your Face­book privacy.

Why you should check your own Face­book pri­vacy settings

Face­book has made many changes in its pri­vacy con­trols and fea­tures over the years. Matt McKeon’s info­graphic on Face­book pri­vacy shows how Facebook’s pri­vacy pol­icy has eroded. I find it dif­fi­cult to keep track of these changes, as some are very spe­cific or gran­u­lar. Bruce Nuss­baum has pointed out in Facebook’s cul­ture prob­lem may be fatal that these actions may cause Facebook’s core audi­ence to aban­don a free ser­vice that has com­modi­tized its users.

These set­tings can be con­fus­ing. For exam­ple, let’s say that you want to let your Face­book friends see your Face­book photo albums, but you don’t want the rest of the Inter­net to have access.

One way to do this is to:

1. Log in to your Face­book account;
2. Go to the Account menu;
3. Choose Pri­vacy settings;
4. Click on per­sonal infor­ma­tion and posts;
5. Go to the row marked Photo Albums;
6. Set your pho­tos pri­vacy set­ting to “Friends”.

Easy, huh? Face­book has changed these menu options and choices in the past, and I expect they will do it again.

“Friends of friends” might not be your friends

If you decide to use the “Friends of friends” set­ting instead of the “Friends” set­ting, you’ve just given ALL of your friends’ friends access to your photo albums.

While this may not seem like a prob­lem, remem­ber that you have NO con­trol over who your friends choose as their friends on Facebook.

You may not have your super­vi­sor, your mother or your ex on your own friends list, but if they’re on just one of your friend’s lists, then they will have access to your photo albums.

Some Face­book pri­vacy changes were intro­duced in an opt-out man­ner, so that users would have to check their accounts and move the defaults to a more pri­vate set­ting. While an opt-in model might pre­serve pri­vacy, the opt-out model lets Face­book change the set­tings for every user.

It’s worth check­ing your Face­book account on a reg­u­lar basis with a third-party tool like ReclaimPrivacy.org

A dis­claimer

Here’s my notes on the var­i­ous options a Face­book user has to man­age their account privacy.

Note: These aren’t rec­om­men­da­tions, just my own notes. If you find errors, leave me a com­ment and a valid, real e-mail address and I’ll fol­low up. Use these notes at your own risk, and do some research before you make changes to your Face­book accounts. I’m not respon­si­ble if you lose or mis­con­fig­ure something.

Set up a pub­lic fig­ure page in your exist­ing Face­book account

One alter­na­tive that is within the Face­book TOS is set­ting up a new pub­lic page as a pub­lic fig­ure in your exist­ing per­sonal Face­book account.

You can then invite any­one to “like” the new pub­lic page. As your friends migrate to the page, you can then remove them from your friends list.

Use one Face­book account and set up sep­a­rate pro­fes­sional friend lists

One solu­tion is to use Facebook’s pri­vacy con­trols to sep­a­rate your friends into 2 groups: pro­fes­sional and per­sonal. Boris Epstein has a fine 2009 arti­cle on Mash­able called How to: Use Face­book for pro­fes­sional net­work­ing. If you read through the arti­cle, you’ll also need to check Barb Dybwad’s Mash­able arti­cle called How to: Cre­ate Friend lists on Face­book.

This option is rea­son­able if you don’t have many face­book Friends. It may take a great deal of effort on your part to set up and man­age the mul­ti­ple friend lists and their pri­vacy settings.

I’m a long-time fan of Face­book friend lists, if only to orga­nize my Face­book friends into spe­cific groups. You can put a spe­cific friend on more than one list. Unfor­tu­nately, Facebook’s friend list edit­ing tools leave a lot to be desired.

Set up a sec­ond Face­book account

It’s against the Face­book TOS to have 2 user accounts. That’s exactly what this Wikia arti­cle called How to use Face­book as a pro­fes­sional net­work­ing tool rec­om­mends doing.

You’ll have to use dif­fer­ent email addresses for each account, and you shouldn’t friend one account from the other if you don’t want peo­ple to find the connection.

If Face­book staffers dis­cover you doing this, the Terms of Ser­vice state that Face­book can delete all of your Face­book accounts.

Set up a new busi­ness account in Facebook

A third alter­na­tive requires you to log out of Face­book, set up a new pub­lic page for your­self as a pub­lic fig­ure, and then claim it with an email address that you have not reg­is­tered in Facebook.

It’s impor­tant that you do NOT set up a pro­file from the link over the new page. this will con­vert this account from a busi­ness Face­book account to a per­sonal Face­book account. Once that con­ver­sion hap­pens, there’s no revert­ing back to the busi­ness account sta­tus. See these Face­book FAQ pages for infor­ma­tion on What is the dif­fer­ence between a busi­ness account and a per­sonal account? and What is the dif­fer­ence between a busi­ness account and a user profile?

If you’re set­ting up a new pub­lic page as a sep­a­rate account, you may want to invite some cur­rent Face­book friends to fol­low or “like” the new page. When they do so, you can then remove or delete your migrated friends from your orig­i­nal Face­book account. Helium’s guide to delet­ing Face­book friends has some tips.

Replace your cur­rent Face­book account with a new Face­book account

There’s the semi-nuclear option described in Lifehacker’s arti­cle How to quit Face­book with­out actu­ally quit­ting Face­book. Set up a new Face­book account, and then, migrate the friends you would like to keep to the new account.

When you’re done, delete your orig­i­nal Face­book account using the tips at the bot­tom of this arti­cle. This may remove your abil­ity to edit, tag and delete pho­tos, links, posts and other Face­book data that you posted, or that some­one else has tagged to your old account.

The nuclear option

Finally, there’s the nuclear option of delet­ing your exist­ing Face­book account entirely. Face­book doesn’t make this option easy to find or exe­cute, much to the cha­grin of those Face­book users who are con­sid­er­ing quit­ting the ser­vice.

Dis­abling or deac­ti­vat­ing your account is not the same thing as dele­tion. A dis­abled account can be reac­ti­vated be log­ging into Face­book again, or click­ing a Face­book Con­nect that you’ve used before on a third party site.

This Cnet arti­cle by Eli­nor Mills called Delet­ing your Face­book account (FAQ) has good information.

On WikiHow.com, there’s also Deac­ti­vate a Face­book account and Per­ma­nently delete a Face­book account.

Need help?

If you need more infor­ma­tion about Face­book, Mash­able has an online Face­book Guide Book with plenty of help­ful pages.

If you’ve got cor­rec­tions or com­ments, feel free to leave them in the form below.

Image by Bal­akov on Flickr via a Cre­ative Com­mons license.

Tagged as: facebook, hack, privacy