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Russell Mickler, Principal Consultant, has over 17 years of professional experience leading and managing IT organizations.
Control Facebook Privacy with Layers of Lists
Written on February 11, 2010
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Facebook recently made some structural changes that allow for greater control over permissions and groups of friends. If you’re interested in creating “layers of trust” of trust like I am, here’s a few simple ways to be able to approach that.
1. Think of Your Layers.
In Facebook, there are a couple of pre-existing Layers that you’re already familiar with:
- Everyone. These are registered users of Facebook.
- Friends. These are registered users of Facebook that you’ve become Friends with in the system.
- Friends of Friends. These are registered users of Facebook who’re the Friends of your Friends.
But my guess is that there’s also a set of “friends” that you’d consider very close, or, that you wish to be able to carve out from the general idea of Friends. In my case, I call that group my “Circle of Trust”. Think of exactly how many additional Layers you might need to meet your privacy goals. Keep in mind that you’re not trying to create a distribution list here but a security list: who should have access to specific information that you might share on Facebook? Create a List only for the people you want to consider “Insiders” to your life. Everyone else is already covered by Facebook’s natural understanding of Privacy.
2. Create your List and add your Friends to it.
Press Account in the upper right and select Edit Friends. Then, select Friends from the left-hand navigator. When you see your Friends, you can now hit the button “Add to List” on one of them. You can create a new List from here, and continue adding the Friends you want to it. In my case, I created the List “Circle of Trust” and started adding all of my special Friends to it.
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3. Assign Permissions.
After you’ve created your Lists, you can now go to Account in the upper-right and select Privacy Settings. Under Profile Information, you can see a bunch of items about you that you may wish only your private Lists to see. Down-select the control and you’ll see Everyone, Friends of Friends, Only Friends, and Custom. Select Custom. In the next screen, select the option “Make this Visible To:” and select “Specific People”. When prompted to type, type in the first couple of letters of one of your Lists you just made. You can then assign the permission to see this information only to the List that you specify. Press Save Setting in order to confirm your changes.
Take the time to do this for every option under the Profile Settings. Remember: when you add a new Friend, you’ll have to decide which List to put them in.
4. Control Distribution.
When you want to control an update to go only to a specific List, you can down-select the Lock under the update you’re prepared to post. Before you press “Share”, set the locked setting to – perhaps – a Custom option: one of your Lists. When you do this, that update is only visible by members of that List. If, for example, that I wanted only to send a message to my “Circle of Trust”, I could select that specific List for the update.
Hopefully that helps out a bit!
R