Facebook Privacy

KeysLast week I gave a workshop at the Society of Australian Genealogists Research Library for new Facebook users. There is a lot of interest in Facebook and how it can be used to connect with family and friends, but thereis also a lot of concern about privacy.

The biggest issue is the default privacy settings that new users are automatically given. Facebook was designed by college students for college students, and the fact is that this age group are not as concerned with privacy as most of us have learned to be. Facebook has been much in the news lately because users can be too trusting with people they meet on Facebook, and .

To address these concerns Facebook has recently simplified the presentation of the privacy settings. What you see when you go in to the privacy settings [under Account in the top right corner] looks like this if you haven’t changed any of the settings:

Facebook default privacy settingsThis is a summary. When you click on Customize settings you can change all of these settings, in much more detail thank you can see here.

This is what my own settings look like:

Updated privacy settingsThere is some information that Everyone can see, and that’s that. Your name, your photo, your gender and your networks (which are optional) is always visible so that people can find you. Everything else is customisable, from Everyone to Only Me:

  • Everyone
  • Friends of Friends
  • Just Friends
  • Customizable – allows you to choose individual people, lists of people, or Only Me

Of course, there is a balance between what you don’t want people to know about you and what people need to be able to see so they know it’s you. I suspect this balance is different for everyone, depending on what you want from Facebook. If you want to get in contact with people you went to school with all those years ago then it helps them to find you if you put your high school and year of graduation in and make it visible to Everyone. If the very thought fills you with horror, then don’t enter it, or make access more restricted. Professional networking needs employment details, connecting with classmates needs your current school or university, and so on.

I think the problem some of us have with Facebook is that we don’t know enough about how to control it. Once you learn how to make the changes you want it can become an indispensable part of how you communicate with friends and family. I’m pleased to say that some of the students in my class last week have gone on to become confident, active members of Facebook.

Don’t be afraid of Facebook, take control!

Facebook???

I am a recent convert to Facebook. It’s a web application that I thought was used by teenagers but it seems I was wrong because when I asked my teenage nieces they didn’t know what I was talking about. They use MySpace.

Facebook seems to be used by young adults and older adults. It’s a networking site for keeping in contact with people and letting them know how you are and what you are doing. Your contacts are called friends and they have to agree to be your friend, so it keeps the spam out.

It’s a lot of fun, there are so many applications that you and your friends can play with. For example I use an application called “Where I’ve Been” – I can click on the countries I’ve been to on a map of the world and they turn blue. I can turn the countries I want to visit green. Others can see where I’ve been if I let them and I can see where they’ve been. I thought I was well-travelled but seeing it laid on a map like that I can see I have a long way to go. I’m ready!

There are genealogy applications too. One has been written by FamilyLink, the people who give us World Vital Records, called “We’re Related”. This is what they say about it:

….share basic family information with anybody you choose.
With this app you can:
– Find your relatives on Facebook
– Keep up with your family
– Build your family tree
– Share news and photos with your family

In the future we hope to allow you to share memories about ancestors with your family, compare your family tree with your friends on Facebook to see if you are related, and to search for your ancestors through the application.

Some of my friends are now my relatives. I can upload a gedcom to share with my relatives but I haven’t managed to do this yet. It expects my name in the gedcom file to be the same as my name in Facebook and it isn’t because I didn’t use my middle name in Facebook.

There are others which I haven’t tried yet but I plan to. One is FamilyBuilder. To quote them directly:

Familybuilder is a free fun tool for:

* Finding your relatives.
* Building your family tree.
* Preserving your family history.
* Scrapbooking the lives of you and your family.
* Remembering loved ones.
* Staying in touch with your family.

I’ve installed this and I’ll see how it goes.

There are others but these two seem to be the most popular. They are not full family tree applications. That’s not what Facebook is about. They allow communication and sharing of information between relatives. News, baby photos, funerals, research discoveries – you can share them all at once.

Try it. It’s quite addictive, and many of the applications are worth playing with.