Blog #3

The article that I chose is called “5 ways to secure your Facebook profile in a post-Timeline world.” The article is from Computer World and the publication date is from February 7th 2012. In the article it talks about the new format that Facebook is using called “Timeline.” Timeline allows everyone, even people that you aren’t friends with, to see your comments, friends, posts, etc. This is extremely privacy invading. The article shows you how to go around and change your settings, so that you can make it more private, like the way it used to be. The advice they give you is: edit your tags, change your settings, change your app settings, and make things viewable by only your friends or friends of friends (not public). The reason why the tell you to edit your tags is because when someone tags you in something everyone can see what they tagged you in, this takes away from privacy. It doesn’t have to be a status that they tag you in, it can also be a picture. Changing your settings can allow you to control who views your profile. Your applications leak a lot of your information this is where a lot of companies get your information such as third-party etc., so changing those will help your privacy. Lastly, your status updates making them private, only viewable by friends or friends of friends, helps greatly because it controls more of what people see. I chose this article because I use Facebook very often and privacy is a huge thing to me and any way that I can be safer on my internet use is a big thing to me. I already knew about the privacy problems with Timeline because I’ve been using Timeline myself now for almost two months and have looked at my profile from other peoples Facebook accounts to see what it looks like to them. This trial and error has shown me a lot. I meddled around with the settings and found out how to change the settings so that I could make certain things only viewable by me and I did.