This week Facebook announced that they are finishing the removal of the “Who can look up your Timeline by name?” setting from all accounts. For most people this setting was removed last year, but if you had that setting turned on when Facebook tried to remove it (originally) they let you keep it. According to Facebook

“The search setting was removed last year for people who weren’t using it. For the small percentage of people still using the setting, they will see reminders about it being removed in the coming weeks”

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What is Facebook Removing

We all used to have the setting, “Who can look up your Timeline by name?,” which controlled whether you could be found when people typed your name into the Facebook search bar.

According to Facebook –

The setting was created when Facebook was a simple directory of profiles and it was very limited. For example, it didn’t prevent people from navigating to your Timeline by clicking your name in a story in News Feed, or from a mutual friend’s Timeline. Today, people can also search Facebook using Graph Search (for example, “People who live in Seattle,”) making it even more important to control the privacy of the things you share rather than how people get to your Timeline.

How Will You Know The Setting Is Removed

If you settle have the setting choice, you will get the following message appearing on your Facebook page over the next couple of weeks.

The message which reads

“We wanted to make sure you know we’re removing the “Who can look up your timeline by name setting. This setting controlled whether people could find your timeline by searching your name……”

will appear on the top of the Facebook newsfeed, where you can either click Okay or Learn More. Once you click Okay, the setting will be removed from your Facebook account.

How Do You Control What Is Seen About You (Per Facebook)

According to Facebook, here are the 3 things you can do to control what can been seen from you (NOTE: That is different from if you can be seen)

1. Share each post with the people you want to be able to see it. You control this every time you post.

2. Use Activity Log to review individual things you’ve already shared. Here you can delete things you may not want to appear on Facebook anymore, untag photos and change the privacy of past posts.

3. Ask friends and others to remove anything they may have shared about you that you don’t want on the site. You can do this by reaching out to the person directly, or using the reporting feature, also available in Activity Log.

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How Can You Control What Is Seen About You (Things Facebook Doesn’t Want You To Do)

Facebook is about sharing with the world, plain and simple. For Facebook, the more you share with the most amount of people the better it is for them (especially financially). The following 2 steps are things you can do to add a little privacy back into your Facebook account.

• DO NOT Upload a picture of you into your profile page. Instead use as Generic a picture as you can find for both the profile picture and the cover picture.

Remember that “On Facebook, your name, profile picture, cover photo, gender, networks, username, and user id are always publicly available”, as is listed if you look under the App Settings in your profile. You can change those settings simply by going to your profile page, putting the mouse over your profile picture and selecting “edit profile picture” and selecting a new picture to use, followed by putting your mouse over your cover picture and selecting “Change Cover” and selecting a new cover picture.

• You will only see an issue with the next change if you use 3rd party apps (like Foursquare, Cardiotrainer, Words With Friends, or any other 3rd party app) that can post info directly to your Facebook page. The change involves going into App Settings, to turn off what Facebook calls its “Platform”.

The problem with Facebook as it’s currently configured for those who do NOT wish to be open to the world, is that for as much security steps you take, as locked down as you try to make your profile, your friends connections, and the apps they use could expose more of your information than you want to have exposed. When you are installing Facebook apps, you have the right and knowledge to choose to not install the app if you aren’t comfortable with what the app says it wants access too. However, you can’t control if your friends have the same concerns and level of understanding of how the apps work.

Facebook argues that allowing other people to share your info with third-party apps makes the “experience better and more social”. Your opinion may vary from theirs, however.

Call me a stick in the mud, but I feel that I should be able to control how social I want to be, not someone else. So visit your privacy settings –> Apps and select to Turn Off Platform. When you do you will see the following message

The message says

– You will not be able to log into websites or applications using Facebook. (Response) Wonderful. Did you know that when you log in to any site using your Facebook id, you are just handing Facebook more and more details of what you do online, even if you don’t post anything about the other site directly to Facebook.

– Your friends won’t be able to interact and share with you using apps and websites. (Response) You mean I get fewer messages about playing games that I have no wish to play anyways. SCORE!!!! Ok in all honesty, I still see messages about games and such on my Facebook newsfeed but I will tell you that the messages are way way down compared to prior to turning the setting off.

– Instant personalization will also be turned off. (Response) I will NEVER EVER EVER buy anything that is posted via Facebook, as Facebook does NOT know how to control their advertising. A large part of what you see posted are things you really should not be trusting. If anyone from Facebook sees this post and would like to contradict what I’m saying, how do you explain the “Sponsored” ad that I just took off my page as I type this post? So I don’t care how personalized you make it.

– Apps you’ve previously installed may still have info you shared (Response) That’s True, and honestly there will be very little you can do

Once you turn off the “Platform” you will see message that the platform is off.

• The last change is the most controversial. The change involves using a “Fake Name”. Keep in mind that using a fake name violates the Facebook terms of service, but if you really want to be able to use Facebook yet not be found by creditors (yes some collections agency’s, use Facebook as a tool to find those who they are trying to collect from), old gf’s / bf’s, or by possible employers it’s a choice you can make. The recommendation if you choose to use a “fake name” is to keep it simple and keep it real sounding as possible. Don’t call yourself Indian Jones (unless your name is actually Indiana, in which case your parents were cool!), Hot Stuff or anything that would draw attention to yourself. As I just said use as real of a fake name as possible.

To change the name on your Facebook account go to Account Settings –> General –> and click Edit next to name.

Once there you can select the name you would to have shown. As you will see on that page there is a limited number of times Facebook will allow you to change you name, so don’t change it until you know for sure what you want to use.

Irony Happens For Facebook

As reported in the San Jose Mercury News, Mark Zuckerberg buys the 4 houses that surround his home in Palo Alto, to get more privacy. As the report lists

The 29-year-old multibillionaire acted after he learned of a developer’s plan to buy one of the properties next door to the Facebook co-founder, said the source. “The developer was going to build a huge house and market the property as being next door to Mark Zuckerberg

So Mr. Zuckerberg paid more than $30 million dollars to buy the 4 homes and then lease them back to the current homeowners, so that Mr. Zuckerberg could protect his privacy.  Does he have the money to do that, without even flinching, OF COURSE. Does he have the right to do that, OF COURSE. However one can’t help but see the irony between Mr. Zuckerberg’s privacy, and the privacy (or lack) of the average Facebook user.

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Source(s):

• San Jose Mercury News
• Tech Crunch
• Facebook News Room