Comments on: Your Private Facebook Info Isn’t So Private

By: Angela

Angela — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 23:16:57 +0000

I had the same problem with my status updates showing up in Bloglines until I changed the privacy settings in Facebook. This works for me:
Go to My Privacy, Profile, below “Status Updates”, uncheck the box that says “Allow friends to subscribe to my status updates”. That should prevent your status updates from appearing in future feeds.

You can also do that for your Notes. Under “Syndication”, select “No one can subscribe”. I have not had problems with my status updates since changing those settings.

By: Ryan Trembath

Ryan Trembath — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 16:38:57 +0000

hey lisa, good info for the people who don’t understand just how public the ‘net is.
I just did a post on a myspace scraper site you may or not be aware of.
Controlling your personal profile can be an uphill battle if you’re not careful about what you say where.

By: Danny Sullivan

Danny Sullivan — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 03:45:08 +0000

At least we know, Lisa, from your Bloglines post that you’ll knock him down gently. Why, he’ll never even realize you’ve gone

By: Lisa

Lisa — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 00:23:31 +0000

@Danny: Thanks for the info. So what you’re really saying is that I have to knock around John Harmon a bit. I see where you’re going there. Smart man.
@:Jill:

“What if one of your FB friends suddenly doesn’t like you so much anymore? They could easily copy your photos and messages and stuff, and do whatever they want with it.”

Yikes, remind me not to hang out with any of your friends.

By: Jill

Jill — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 23:26:20 +0000

Nothing you say online is private. That's basically how you have to think of it. You should never say or do anything (even in a walled-garden) that you'd not want to be made public.

What if one of your FB friends suddenly doesn't like you so much anymore? They could easily copy your photos and messages and stuff, and do whatever they want with it.

Remember the Miss New Jersey "scandal" from a few months back? People got a hold of her private Facebook pictures (which incidently weren't bad/dirty...Miss New Jersey is a good friend of my daughter, who took some of the photos!).

The point is, anything you say or post anywhere is potentially fair game. Even on private forums, email, whatever.

By: Danny Sullivan

Danny Sullivan — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 19:52:52 +0000

Not quite Facebook’s fault. For example, you can get a feed of your Gmail inbox. If you give that to Bloglines, I’d see that certain people may have emailed you (person, subject line) but not what they sent. It’s down to Bloglines (and other services) accepting password protected feeds. John’s feed is only showing up because he specifically fed it to Bloglines and didn’t keep it private.
Then again, Facebook’s help says this shouldn’t happen:
“Won’t Bloglines and other similar services make my notes content searchable by the world if my friends enter the URL for my Notes feed into those services?
Atom and RSS feeds from Facebook include the Bloglines Feed Access Control extension , and we set the access parameter to “deny” for all of our feeds. We also indicate in our robots.txt that feeds should not be visited or indexed by bots. The major aggregators and search engines (Bloglines, Technorati, Google, Yahoo!) all appear to respect these directives. If you are very concerned about the possibility of someone seeing your notes that you don’t want him or her to see, we’ve added a privacy option that you can set on your notes privacy page which will prevent any of your Notes from being syndicated in any RSS or Atom feed.”
I haven’t explored this enough, but it could be that there’s a setting that John used to override this.

By: Rob

Rob — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 19:43:53 +0000

WOW – very interesting – this changes everything!!! Thanks Lisa – diggin in now to see what’s really out there!