Facebook has done it again. Today I went into my privacy settings to turn off Places because I don’t want people tagging me. Much to my dismay I found that the scoundrels at Facebook have reset my privacy settings AGAIN and worst of all, they turned on by default “Friends can check me in to Places.” I have talked about Facebook resetting my privacy settings without my consent in a previous blog post and I see that they are at it again. Maybe this isn’t happening to you – maybe they are just picking on me, but just in case you’d better check your settings. There are several images at the bottom of this post showing all the different screenshots I’ll be talking about, starting with a screenshot I took of my Places settings.
Top Left Screenshot:
This shot is of the settings as they were in my Facebook account. I did not turn on the “Friends can check me into places”, it was already enabled by default. I just dropped down the menu to show you that it was checked.
Top Right Screenshot:
Some privacy settings that I mentioned in my 5/19 blog post. I had turned them off prior to my 5/19 post but Facebook turned them back on so I reset them to “Friends only.” As you can see from today’s screenshot, Facebook turned these things back on again. Unbelievable. This is at least the third time I’ve disabled this. The worst part is that the information controlled by these little checkmarks is information that your friends share about you with third-party sites without you – or them – knowing it! If you locked down your privacy settings before, you had better do it again!
Bottom Left Screenshot:
I disabled this feature as my previous post shows, but Facebook apparently doesn’t care about how I want to manage my privacy, they will do what they want.
Bottom Right Screenshot:
Facebook did a good job of burring their new “feature” in your privacy settings by making it difficult to find. Isn’t it interesting how they hold press conferences about their newest feature, but obscure the feature’s settings? It’s almost like they don’t want you to find it! I’m sure they will just re-enable mine soon anyway. As the screenshot shows, you have to drop down your privacy setting from the top right, click “privacy settings”, and then click the tiny little link to “customize settings.” Then you have to scroll down the list to find the two little mentions of Places as I noted in the top left screenshot.
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Facebook isn’t interested in what you want to share and what you don’t. They just want to make as much money as possible off of you. I guess it’s their right for letting you use their system for free, but now they are just getting greedy. Shame on Facebook for messing with people like this. Keep it up Facebook… you’re just priming the pump for the next generation of social networking… hopefully it’ll be something like Diaspora.
2 thoughts on “Sneaky Facebook”
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If Facebook keeps pulling these sorts of cheap shots, I am going to delete my profile. It honestly isn’t worth it to me to keep having to spend 10 or 20 minutes to find everything and lock it back down to make sure that my profile stays as under the radar as I want it too. Not to mention that there are plenty of other social networking sites out there to choose from.
Hopefully Google can come up with something that really will be able to rival Facebook, and if they do, I will be one of the first to switch over. This is just getting ridiculous.
My settings weren’t changed, so maybe you’re just special… which we all know is a little true.
However, I didn’t know about the ‘Basic Directory Information’ settings, so I’m glad you covered that. I’m hopefully now a little more shut-down than I was 15 minutes ago.
It doesn’t surprise me that they continue to make your privacy something that’s easy to control. If it was plain and easy to navigate, they would have been shut down financially a long time ago… either that or we’d be paying a monthly fee for usage.