I'm Steve Dotto.
How the heck are you this fine day?
Me?
I am feeling somewhat trepidant?
Why am I feeling somewhat trepidant?
Because you and I are about descend into the murky waters of Facebook privacy and security
settings.
You should be trepidant, too.
All right, let's take a look at one aspect of Facebook's privacy and security.
Now I am not a huge fan of how Facebook communicates our options as far as protecting our privacy
because Facebook, bottom line is I don't think they care one iota about protecting your privacy.
They probably care about not being sued but the less privacy that you have, as far as
Facebook is concerned, the more information they have access to on you which they convert
into money so they want you to have as little privacy as possible.
At least that's my belief.
They can argue with that should they choose.
Consequently, I think they make it very difficult for us to understand exactly what is private
and what's not within their environment and the settings are confusing at best as far
as setting things up.
Before we dive in, I'll just give you one kind of overriding theory that I have or overriding
theme that I constantly harp on privacy settings on the internet.
It really is the same as far as security settings on the internet.
When people ask me how secure an online service like a Dropbox or Google Drive or any cloud-based
service is, I have the standard saying which is the internet is 100% secure for anything
which does not need to be secure.
We can say the same thing about privacy.
Your privacy is protected on Facebook 100% for anything which does not need to be private.
See, regardless of how much you lock down any social network, anything you post on it,
you have to consider to be fair game for everybody to see.
So before you post anything at all, even if you've got your privacy settings locked down,
you have to think anybody in the world will likely see this including mom, your partner,
your brother, your old teacher or the government.
Anybody will gain access to it if they really want to see it or if you're just unlucky.
So the best piece of advice we can give is just don't post anything that you're at all
uneasy with.
Having said that, going into Facebook's Privacy Settings here—and you do that by going into
the little triangle Menu and clicking on Settings—you will find a bewildering assortment of different
settings here available to us.
You should take time, go through, read and understand what each and every one of these
menu items represents.
That's really your job.
Facebook is not going to do it for you and their default settings don't protect your
privacy very much at all.
What I want to talk to you about today is the Apps one.
The reason that the App ones is so interesting right now is Facebook has a reason to have
a relationship with many different other services.
There is a good reason that that relationship has formed and a fairly popular method of
streamlining our journey online these days is something called OAuth, which is an automatic
online authorization that allows us to log into services using different services' log-on
criteria.
You'll see it.
You'll go to a service and they'll say, "Would you like to create a new user account or do
you want to log on using Google or Facebook?"
You'll see that often and you'll probably wonder which is better.
Is it more secure?
Now I don't know which is more secure but here's my take on it.
If you're a really good password manager, if you use something like LastPass which we've
shown you in previous videos and you use that religiously so you've got nice, encrypted
passwords and you've got a good password strategy, I think you're better off creating unique
accounts for each and every service that you log onto.
It might take you a little bit longer to log on but you're far more secure.
If you're the sort of person who does what we tell you not to do and you just have a
single password—darn you!—or you use the same password many, many times.
Then I think it's a great idea to use your Google or your Facebook account to log in
because that information is not being transferred.
You're just being authorized through and so your password is in less places and it's less
likely to get stolen in that particular case or get compromised.
That's my take on it.
It's not scientific.
I don't know if the big experts in security agree with me or not but that's the way I
look at it from a pragmatic point of view.
The other question is what apps should have access to our Facebook log on information
and what else are they asking for?
For example if I was in HootSuite, which is a social media dashboard which does things
like I use it to do all my tweets, logging onto that with my Twitter account, which they
allow, seems to be completely reasonable because the two have a symbiotic relationship.
Understanding that relationship and then what you're giving authority to, that's an important
part of the process that you have to educate yourself on because every time you use one
of these services, that app will tell you in the confirmations screen what access it's
asking for within Facebook.
Some will ask you for the right to be able to post to Facebook on your behalf.
Some will ask you to be able to look up your friends, your email address or other things
within Facebook so you have to determine whether or not that's justified or not as you authorize
each app.
Some of the apps which have a more noble purpose, shall we say, there's good reason to give
them access and other ones, maybe not such a good reason.
This is where we now, on a regular basis, should go and take a look at what we have
given access to and what we're not using then remind ourselves of what access they have
to our Facebook account.
This is a really healthy exercise that you should do at least quarterly, I would say,
because often when we're logging onto these services, we just kind of want to get in and
see what they're doing so we're not really thinking about what we're giving permission
to.
I think in the back of our minds, we're thinking I can always go back and correct this later
but we often don't go back later.
This is the later when we should go back and correct.
So let's take a look at some of the things.
For me, obviously having allowing YouTube access is natural since I publish videos like
this.
As we go through, we see the different apps and you see I've got a lot of apps that have
access to my Facebook account here or that I log on using Facebook that have related.
Some of them, if I click on say The Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada, if I click on
that, the reason that I installed their app is I do an MS Walk.
I go for a walk and I raise money.
So Facebook is a great place to get people to sponsor and to raise money.
They're asking for my basic info, my email address, my birthday and my location and they're
also asking to be able to post on my behalf, which means they aren't posting without my
permission but within they're app I'm saying I can post this to Facebook and then they're
putting that post through.
Those are all completely legitimate for this particular app.
So I'm just going to leave things the way they are even though I'm not going to be using
them for a couple of months because the next that I'm on is not till next year.
I'm still going to leave that one active.
But as I scroll down a little bit further, I see other apps that I don't use very much
anymore.
Well, I do use Songza a lot but why has Songza got access to my Facebook account?
What are they asking for?
Well, they're actually not asking for much.
It's mainly log-on information.
They're not asking to be able to post so again I'm probably going to say it seems fairly
benign.
I'm going to go through and I'm going to look at all of these different apps and see exactly
what they ask for.
22Social Instant Access, I think that's like a social media dashboard that I don't use.
I can see here the last log-in is more than six months ago.
It's not something that I'm using so I'm just going to click here and say remove the app
and now it's being taken off.
If I need it again, I can go back to it but obviously I haven't used it in six months.
It's not important to me.
So going through, filtering and cleaning it up is a really healthy exercise.
Unfortunately, this is just one step of the things that you should be doing as far as
protecting your privacy on Facebook.
We could spend hours going through all of the different menu items within the Privacy
Settings and trying to explain them to you.
Then unfortunately, we probably have to make another video in three months because Facebook
will have changed some of the things and some of the ways they do things.
But constantly visiting and going through the Menu settings, making sure that you are
comfortable with where your settings are and at the same time understanding that regardless
of how you set your settings that you can't trust those settings to be 100% infallible,
I think those are really healthy attitudes to take into Facebook, which does a good job
then of protecting your privacy and not allowing something untoward to happen.
I hope you found this useful if somewhat depressing perhaps.
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I just appreciate you taking a look.
I also appreciate you taking the time to learn with me today.
I hope you found it valuable, as I've said.
With that, I am done.
I've got to go through this list and it's going to take me a while.
I'm Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle