on Tuesday, July 21st, 2009
Our very own Chris Breikss – President and Co-Founder of 6S Marketing - was featured on the Saturday Morning Global TV News last Saturday morning with Sophie Lui to discuss Facebook and the Canadian Government’s privacy policies.
Jennifer Stoddart, the Canadian Privacy Commissioner criticizes that Facebook retains user information after users have closed their accounts and that too much private data is provided to 3rd party developers. Facebook has been given 30 days to implement changes to meet the concerns of the Canadian Government.
Chris speaks to the fact that Facebook does offer high privacy settings for account users but some people may not be fully aware of these settings. He also further goes onto saying that there are some great applications on Facebook created by 3th party developers, but there should be more screening to weed out spammy applications.
He believes that Facebook will make the appropriate changes the Canadian government is looking for, as they have continued to improve the overall privacy settings as the social network has exploded in popularity.
If you’re concerned about your privacy settings on Facebook, follow these simple steps to ensure that you’ve set up your privacy levels to a setting that you are comfortable with.
On the top right hand corner of your Facebook account, you have three link options -Your Name, Settings, and Logout. Hover your mouse over settings and select ‘Privacy Settings’ and from here, you have the option of selecting: Profile, Search, News Feed and wall, and Applications.
Facebook Privacy Settings
Each of these pages will give you the option of choosing what information from your Facebook profile you wish to share. Utilizing these options, you can completely customize your privacy settings from completely open to completely closed.
If you are on Facebook make sure you look at your settings and are satisfied with what people can see about you. Facebook gives you the tools you need to protect your privacy, it’s up to you to ensure you use them!
2 Comments
Comment by Jose Uzcategui — July 23, 2009 @ 2:46 pm
Congratulations on the media coverage! …and on such a hot topic.
My biggest concern with Facebook are also 3rd party applications and their access to information once installed. Once you click that “Allow” button when you install a new application it feels you’re giving up too much, regardless of whether I am or not.
I think that if Facebook would clarify what kind of information or give the ability to choose what kind of information the 3rd parties have access to, that would be a step in the right direction.
Cheers – Jose.
Comment by lila — January 3, 2010 @ 9:08 am
I was happy to hear that someone was looking out for us!
However, when the privacy options were changed, ALL our information went public, from photos, to emails, wall comments, I mean EVERYTHING.
This move on part of the facebook team was almost as if they were taunting and making fun of us
To explain. I am being stalked by a very sick individual. I have taken ever precaution, to make sure my profile, picture nothing, is visible.
To my surprise, when I logged into my Facebook account after I got home from work, which meant my profile was open all day, I found out that everything was public for that day.
This stalker has now all my information, access to my photos that she uses to impersonate me etc.
Sadly some users have not found out how to go put back all their privacy options.
This was a very bad idea on the Facebook teams move, it was as if they did this on purpose. If you are going to change our privacy options then you should make everything private and let us know of the options that we can open our profiles to be more public.
Unfortunately it is too late for me, and there are no laws against stalkers that can help me.
So thanks Facebook for your co-operation!
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