Facebook “Enter Bad Words Here” Your Privacy

This week, in the pursuit of the mighty dollar, the douchebags at Facebook decided to a$$rape "do bad things to" your online privacy.  The so called new privacy settings, while giving the perception of more security options, actually expose more of Facebook information to the public than ever before.  Now, before I go on with my rant,

if you are some narcissistic attention whore then you will like the new changes and should go with the Facebook recommended defaults.  If on the other hand you give a rats ass about the amount exposure your information gets, you should continue reading.  When you logged into your Facebook account you were greeted with an "Important message from Facebook" (see that message here).  If you proceeded to the Next Step, you were given options that consisted of choosing between "new" more public options and your "old" settings. The one option conspicuously missing from the selection was the "I would like Facebook to stop f*cking with my privacy".  For the uninitiated, what Facebook is doing here is creating more public content to draw more traffic at the expense of your privacy.

So, the practical advice "“ leave all your old settings untouched.  Then go to the privacy settings under the settings menu, and select Profile Information. Go over the settings you have selected and make sure you are limiting your exposure to the level you are comfortable with.  Remember, if you select "Everyone" they really do mean everyone "“ the whole friggin zoo that is the Internet.

Another option under the Privacy Settings that's  worth visiting is the "Search" option.  Here you can disable "Allow Indexing" box and make sure that "Only Friends" is selected for Facebook Search Results.  Also if your are the sensible type who wants his/her friends list hidden from the strangers, you can tweak that but not from the Privacy Settings.  Go to the Profile page, click the pencil icon in the upper right corner of your Friends box and uncheck "show my friends in my profile".  This will limit your friends to only being seen by your other friends.  Also from the Profile page you can tweak information parameters about your siblings, your political and religious views.

BTW, if for some reason you decided that you had enough with Facebook and want to close your account immediately "“ DO NOT DO THAT!  Your information will remain unchanged and exposed even if your account is closed.  Make sure you EDIT your account details first, change your name, your address and all your other details to some random goofy crap, so that the existing data gets overwritten.  Break contact with your friends, unsubscribe groups, replace your photos with animal porn, etc, Some of you may ask, "if you are have so much against Facebook, they WTF are you going on it?!".  My dear friends, I am on Facebook solely because deep down, I really give a shite about my friends Mafia Wars progress and the various barn animals that keep getting lost and are in need of a good home.