- Now we're coming to you live
from outside our studios here in Asia
with some breaking news.
We have just learned,
and our highly-paid lawyers have confirmed,
that copying and pasting a privacy statement
on your Facebook wall does not, in fact,
grant you any extra privacy or protection
beyond the terms and conditions that you agreed to
when you created your Facebook profile.
Back to you in the studio.
That is shocking.
(beep echoing)
(air rushing)
What a pleasure to have you back
for another All Things Secured video.
My name's Josh,
and today I invite you to look over my shoulder
as I walk you step by step
through the most important changes you need to make
to your privacy and security settings
on your Facebook account.
If I were you, I'd pause this video,
open it in the browser on your computer,
or if you're on your phone,
try to find a laptop that you can get onto,
log on to your Facebook account,
and make these changes with me in real time.
They're very quick and simple changes to make,
and, I promise you, they make a big difference
in your privacy and security.
And, better yet, if you stick with me to the end,
I'll even share with you my favorite power tip
for those users who are very serious
about maintaining their security and privacy
in regards to Facebook.
Okay, let's dive right in.
The first thing you wanna do
is go to your profile page on Facebook,
which is basically just going to Facebook
and clicking your name here on the upper right.
What we wanna do is we wanna find this eye,
this is View As, and click on that,
and what it does is it allows you to see
how your profile looks to the general public
that isn't connected to you in any way.
So if anyone was able to find your profile and look at it,
what would they find?
For a lot of people, they would find their friends list,
their photos, connections, and all that stuff,
but what it should look like is this.
I've got my updated cover photo.
You can't see any other photos.
You can't see my friends.
You can't see anything in my About
about where I work, places I've lived, anything like that,
because I've restricted all of that.
So if yours doesn't look like this,
then the next few steps
that I'm gonna bring you through are very important.
Go to the upper-right corner on the right here,
click on Account, click on Settings & Privacy,
and Facebook is doing a better job
of allowing you do a Privacy Checkup.
So I want you to click on that Privacy Checkup
and then Who can see what you share.
This is where we're gonna start
on looking at our profile information.
So what you see is I've got my phone number,
I've got my email, all, my birthdate,
and I've set this to Only me, to just Friends,
to Friends, to Only me.
My relationships, this is especially important.
Let's say you've got a relationship with your mother
who has her maiden name stuck in her Facebook profile,
if someone were able to find that,
that would make it very easy for them to find out
what your mother's maiden name is
whenever they're trying to break into your bank account.
You can also do that for work, education,
and who friends the friends that you follow.
All right, so clicking on Next,
the first thing I wanna do is want to limit the past posts.
So what this means is instead of having to go through
and individually go through
all of my photos and all of my posts
to set them as a specific privacy setting,
what I'm going to do is I'm gonna click Limit,
and it's going to give me this,
basically a warning saying,
"If you limit everything right now,
you can't go back and change it
without doing it on every single post."
But that's okay. I want to limit all of my posts.
This is something that's up to you,
whether you wanna do it or not.
I highly recommend it.
There's no reason for you
to make all of these things public.
Next you wanna look at your future posts.
Who do you want to be able to see
your future posts by default?
Now you can change this on specific posts if you like,
but I wanna set it to,
you can set it to specific groups that you want,
or you can just set it to direct friends,
which what I would recommend you do.
Same with stories, who can see those?
And, finally, we wanna look at anybody that you've blocked.
If this something that you do,
you can keep them on that block list.
And what that's gonna do is now when you look
at how your profile is viewed by the public,
it's gonna be much more sparse.
You're not gonna be giving away tons of free information
to anybody that wants to find out who you are.
Okay, next we wanna look at
how people can find your profile on Facebook.
Here we are again on the Settings & Privacy
and the Privacy Check up,
and I wanna click on How people can find you on Facebook.
This means that if they search on Google for your name,
will your profile come up in the search?
So I wanna look and say who can send friend requests.
First of all, I only want Friends of Friends
to able to send friend requests.
I don't want some random stranger that I don't know.
Now maybe that's not the case,
maybe you do want strangers,
you can even set Everyone if you wanted to,
but I recommend having Friends of Friends.
Now next, you want to decide who can look you up
based on your phone number and your email address.
I decided that I only want Friends
to be able to look me up by phone number,
and then Friends of Friends by email,
but this is entirely up to you.
And, finally, and this is very important,
you want search engines
to not be able to index your profile,
which means if someone searches for your name,
it'll show up in Google.
I don't really want that.
I don't have any need to have that done.
If somebody wants to connect with me,
they will probably be connected
through another one of my friends, so I turn that off.
And that is how you make sure
that you don't have your search visibility
for your profile set to On.
Okay, the next thing we're gonna look at
is facial recognition.
Facebook has the ability, whether you know it or not,
to take any photo or video,
any photo or video that's uploaded to their servers,
and scan it for your face and then tag you in that photo.
I would much rather have my friends
or family tag me in anything that they upload.
I don't like Facebook having the ability to do that.
So if you wanna turn that off,
click here on the upper right of your account.
You can do it in the Privacy Checkup.
We're gonna look directly into the settings here.
On the left side, you're looking for Face Recognition,
and you wanna make sure that this is set to No.
We don't wanna give Facebook the ability
to recognize us in photos and videos
because, let's just be honest,
that's a little bit creepy.
Okay, since we're already here in the settings page,
let's shift over to something known
as Off-Facebook Activity.
On the left side here,
you're gonna see your Facebook information,
and you're looking for this Off-Facebook Activity tab.
It's a new tool that Facebook's given us
to allow us to see the kind of information
that other companies off of Facebook gather on us
and give to Facebook in order to allow them
to advertise to us better.
So you can click here on Manage Off-Facebook Activity
to see which companies and what sites are doing that.
And I've already cleared mine,
but you'll probably see a number of them on yours.
You can clear that history if you'd like.
You can also manage future activity
by clicking this Manage Future Activity button
and then turning it off.
And, of course, Facebook's gonna give you this warning,
they don't want you to do this,
but you can turn this off and then make sure
that that is no longer information that Facebook has.
They're still gonna be collecting that information,
but it's not something that they can use
to advertise to you.
Next, let's go back into the Privacy Checkup here,
in the Settings & Privacy,
and we're looking for Your ad preferences on Facebook.
Again, this is all information that Facebook collects on us
and puts under our profile,
and, really, they're never gonna stop doing that,
but what they can do, what we can request that they do,
is that they don't associate that information
with our profile for the purpose of ad tracking.
So, for instance, if I go in here,
it's gonna give us all this information about ads,
and then I can tell them what kind of information
that other advertisers can use in order to advertise to you.
Can they use the fact that I'm married? No.
Can they use my employer? No.
Can they use my job title or my education?
No, I don't want any of that stuff
to be available to advertisers.
And then my social interactions.
If I like something, what Facebook can do
is it can show it to some of my friends and say,
"Hey, this person, your friend, liked this,
and so you should like it too
because they're paying us to advertise to you."
I don't want my likes to be able to be used in that way.
It just feels wrong, and so I set this to Only me.
I don't want it to be my Friends. I want it to be Only Me.
All right, the last thing we wanna talk about here
is location services for our mobile devices.
Truth be told, most of use Facebook on our mobile devices,
and I don't feel comfortable
having the Facebook app on my phone,
and I highly recommend you delete it
if you can muster up the strength to do that.
But if you can't, what you really need to do
is go in to your settings up here
and then find Location on the left side.
You wanna make sure that the location history
for your mobile devices is turned off.
You can do the same thing in your mobile device,
and I recommend you do that,
or you can also do it here on the desktop settings.
So that's really the basics of what you need to do
to control the amount of information
and privacy that you have on your Facebook account.
But there's one more thing,
this power tip that I highly suggest you do,
and it's related to something called a Facebook Pixel.
As a website owner, one of the things that I can do
is I can set a Facebook Pixel on my website
that will track any user that has a Facebook account
on my website, and then I can use that information
to create an audience that I can advertise to.
Websites all over the internet do this,
and there's very few ways that you can get around this,
but there is one that I highly recommend,
and that's if you're using a browser like Firefox.
It's one of the reasons I prefer Firefox over Chrome.
But if you look here,
on Firefox, I've got this Facebook Container.
And what this Facebook Container does
is it doesn't allow Facebook to follow you
all around the web.
So let's take an example.
Let's say if I were to go usatoday.com,
what you're gonna see here
is that this Facebook Container is going to protect me,
or protect me from being tracked by "USA Today"
through Facebook so that they can advertise to me.
I know most people love Chrome, I love Chrome as well,
but by converting over to Firefox,
it gives you an opportunity
to really fence in Facebook's ability
to follow you anywhere you go on the web.
That's all I got for you.
If you wanna leave other ideas in the comments below,
I welcome them there.
Give this video a thumbs up, and thanks for watching.