The Facebook Privacy Saga: Controlling Your App and Website Visibility

Personal privacy awareness is an ever increasing issue on the web. Even more so with the surge of social media platforms that share demographic information so readily and openly. How can you protect your personal information in a cyber-drenched culture? You CAN limit what information people access! Need help with this?

Privacy Settings

Mari Smith, well-known Facebook expert, recently explained more in depth in a webinar about Facebook privacy settings work, and how you can control them. The changes are easy, but you have to know how to make the changes to protect yourself. With the availability and convenience of the “app-era,” people continually download or “give access” to apps; when you do either of these, they often times can retrieve information such as birth date, pictures, user ids, gender, networks, and many more. In this fourth post in our series about Facebook privacy, we will be specifically talking about apps and website visibility and what your options are for controlling your basic information online.

Go to your Facebook Privacy Settings:

This will bring your to the main Privacy changes page:

Beneath that will give you a list of options to change:

Go to Apps and Websites:

This is going to be the control center for you to manage who has access to your basic information.

Apps You Use:

You probably have more Apps on Facebook than you realized, and they all have access to your basic information. The App Settings allow you to control what the app can access (as you can see, some of them REQUIRE certain information to even get the app), or to simply delete them. This page also allows you to adjust who sees your app activity in their timeline. Go back through all of your apps and make sure you are only allowing them to see the information you want them (and your friends) to see .

Maintaining your personal privacy in a knowledge-ready age can be simple, but you have to know how to protect yourself! These are quick-and-easy steps to ensure that your private information is not going to be accessed by everyone (if you do not want to, that is).

If you have any questions, or would like to find out more information, you can reach us through Facebook, or by commenting below. At the end of the series, we will host a Facebook discussion on Linqto to answer further questions.