Protecting Your Privacy on Facebook

Here are a few things you might not know about Facebook.

Overview: Facebook is tied to government monitoring

A number of Facebook’s investors are tied to secretive US government agencies whose sole purpose is to collect data on individuals and monitor ‘terrorism’. Do you know where your information is going? Watch this video, originally released in 2004 here: www.albumoftheday.com/facebook/

or view the video below:

My personal thoughts: Facebook is the luckiest gold mine the government has ever stumbled onto. Remember reading George Orwell in school? 1984? Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World? The idea of Big Brother in utopian societies was originally fear-based, you’d always be monitored.. security cameras, snitches, being locked into a rigid new societal system.. etc.

We are living that time now, except instead of other sources reporting your activity and all your personal information, Facebook has made it a fun social activity. Self-reporting is now fun! Like a baby who doesn’t want to eat vegetables until you zoom zooom airplane spoon feed them, and then healthy food is great because it’s fun.

Main difference: turning over all your personal data, contacts, relationships, and behavioral patterns is not to your benefit. In an age when google is the surface-level indicator of how much you can dig up just by typing in a few keywords, and how much information is cached, this should make you wary. News reporters can manipulate sound bites, religious doctrine can be selectively chosen to one’s advantage– you don’t think leaving an enormous e-paper trail of potentially incriminating information won’t come back to haunt you in the future?

Protecting your comments and likes from being made public on the web

A recent reposting of instructions circulating on facebook:

FRIENDS PLEASE DO ME A FAVOR:

Please hover over my name here, wait for the box to load and then hover over the “Subscribed” link. When the list pops up. PLEASE UNCHECK the “Comments and likes” choice.

I would rather that MY comments on MY friends’ posts ARE NOT MADE PUBLIC for everyone to see in the new top right hand box of the screen. Sometimes they are private in-jokes or conversations that would be taken out of context.
… … … …

**THANKS**

Then repost if you don’t want your EVERY MOVE posted on the right box for everyone to see! 🙂

Facebook tracks what you do even when you’re logged out

Read the article here: venturebeat.com/2011/09/25/facebook-tracking-logged-out/

“With my browser logged out of Facebook, whenever I visit any page with a Facebook like button, or share button, or any other widget, the information, including my account ID, is still being sent to Facebook,” Cubrilovic wrote.

“They definitely have the information stored,” Cubrilovic told VentureBeat in a Skype interview today. “As to what they do with it, you can only speculate.”

To block Facebook from following you, you need to delete all Facebook-related cookies after logging out. You may also be able to use AdBlock Plus to block Facebook, with the following rules, as reported on Hacker News:

facebook.com^$domain=~facebook.com ~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net
facebook.net^$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net
fbcdn.com^$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net
fbcdn.net^$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net

Note: we haven’t tested these rules for efficacy yet.

More technical details and ideas here news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3035418

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Last Updated: September 25, 5:30pm