FACEBOOK PRIVACY: TAGS AND NOTICES

Tagging on Facebook can be a really fun way to interact with family and friends. However, everyone feels differently when it comes to protecting your online information. In our last post we talked about photo privacy and how to control who sees your pictures. Today we’ll look at some privacy options new to Facebook under How Tags Work. What’s neat about these features is Facebook is giving us more control over what appears in our timelines when others tag us—both in photos and in posts.

QUICK REVIEW

Facebook announced significant new changes to the look, feel and functionality of personal profiles at their F8 Developers Conference in September. They are slowly rolling out those changes over the next few months to all Facebook subscribers. In anticipation of those changes we are writing this series from a privacy perspective so you can control how your information appears online. To start, you can access your privacy settings at the top right of your profile homepage:

The information about tags and notices can be found here:

If you scroll down the page, you will see these categories:

Today we’re going to talk about “How Tags Work.”

HOW TAGS WORK

As you can see from the screenshot above, there are 5 different options that will allow you to control how others may tag you on Facebook. The Timeline Review option is a notification service. If you choose to turn this option on, you will receive notifications anytime someone has tagged you in a post. Although you won’t be able to control how those tags appear on other profiles, you will be able to control if that posts appears on YOUR timeline.

The Tag Review gives you control of tags that others want to add to your posts. If you chose to enable this option, you will receive a notice and have the option to review the tag and allow or block the tag from appearing in your timeline.

Maximum Timeline Visibility refers to how far out into your network posts that you’ve tagged reach:

As you can see from the picture above, you can get very specific about who your audience is that sees posts that you’re tagged in. Keep in mind, however, that this is a default setting. If you set this too narrowly, you will constantly be coming back to individual posts and changing this setting. This will be a setting you may want to play with over time to get a feel for your comfort level.

Tag Suggestions, if you enable, allows Facebook to identify you in pictures your friends upload. This can be a great time-saver for them and/or you. The only problem is that you could, potentially, be misidentified. You may want to go back to that friends list and make sure peeps on that list know you well enough that misidentification would be unlikely

Friends Can Check You Into Places allows others to check you into a Place using their mobile phone. This can seem harmless enough. However there are stories of folks, in real time, posting check ins on Facebook only to come home to a house that has been broken into. We recommend posting where you’ve been “after the fact” to avoid the risk.

On Friday, look for our blog about Facebook Privacy: Apps and Website Settings.