Facebook: privacy and permissions

I don't really know all of the details about Facebook's most recent changes to privacy management.  I do know that they added several new features since I last attempted to configure all of my privacy and sharing settings.  One of those is being able to selectively deny content to a dynamic group.  This is possible through Facebook friend lists.

So, here's my own scenario:

I started out on Facebook by inviting my closest friends, i.e. annoying them with even more social networking spam.  YEARS LATER, most of them joined Facebook.  :-)  Once Facebook really caught on with the general Web-surfing public, all kinds of people were sending me friend requests.  I was sending friend requests to all kinds of people.  As a result, I ended up with a wide variety of relationships represented in my Facebook friends pool.

The more Facebook became a common means of communicating with people, I had to rethink what I was sharing with whom, or what I was posting on Facebook.  As a result, I narrowed the range of content that I posted.  While this might be a good idea anyway, so as not to offend and alienate every person I know (that sees my Facebook posts), I didn't like the idea of Facebook only serving as a means to share a particular grade of information with a particular grade of friend, deferring to the lowest common denominator.  "It's sunny here today.  :-)"  How enthralling!  "I like everyone.  :-)"  "I'm in no way offensive, Boss/Co-worker/Gossiping Office-Mate,  :-)"

The clearest way I could segregate people, my own litmus test, when necessary was to have a group called "f**k" -- that's the F word, kids -- or, if necessary, a group called "no f**k".  Into the former, I would put people I could use the F word with -- an indicator of familiarity and trust.  :-)  Into the latter, the people with whom I did not feel I could or should use the F word with.  Now, more descriptive, perhaps, I just created a Facebook friend list called "squares & oppressors" into with I piled an assortment of professional contacts and barely-friends.  (I'm confident that my family members have endured enough tribulations in life that some printed words are insufficient cause for them to un-friend me on Facebook.)

So, that was the biggest thing I did recently.  I went through my friends and added them to a list that I could safely remove from my circle of trust without fear that they would never get to know the real me.  Of course, once I created the list I then had to do something with it.  This is basically what I did:

• Went to http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy.
• Clicked through each item with sharing options, i.e., displayed something like "Everyone", or "Shared with", or "Only friends", etc.
• Selected the last item in the menu, "Customize".
• In the area called "Make this visible to" I selected "Only friends" and deselected all of my networks, or selected "None of my networks".  (I didn't select "Friends of friends" because many of my coworkers I wanted to protect from my life's true nature are also friends of friends.)
• In the area called "Hide this from" I typed in the name of the friend list I made, called "squares & oppressors".
• Went to http://www.facebook.com/editapps.php?v=allowed and repeated the above steps for each link called "Edit Settings".  Some of the applications don't post or share information so they won't have fields you need to change.

Now I can go to Facebook and post the F word all day!

Now, of course, the settings I described above hide all of your shared content from the same group of people, the squares and the oppressors.  You can change those to suit your needs.  For now, I'm content with having two groups of friends on Facebook: one group that sees everything I do and another that just knows that I exist and can send messages to me and probably thinks I'm extremely boring or private.

Please let me know if you have any advice!  I'd love to make Facebook even more complicated to use responsibly.

Posted via email from Ali Nabavi's posterous