Steps to improve privacy on Facebook

I don’t have much time for Facebook for myself but a lot of folks ask me about the social networking site.  Most of the questions are about privacy.  The news in the media seems to create more questions than answers.  To be honest the official bullshit about privacy confuses me.

Folks who friended me on Facebook probably wonder if there’s anyone there.  That’s how little I use my Facebook account.

ReclaimPrivacy.org has an easy to use tool to simplify your Facebook privacy.  It is a BookMarklet that you drag to your shortcut bar.  Then you go to your Facebook privacy page and click the BookMarklet.  ReclaimPrivacy.org has the instructions.  You get a list of color coded privacy categories with links to fix issues.  There’s red and yellow for categories that need attention and green for good.  This is something that Facebook should offer themselves.

The first time I ran the ReclaimPrivacy.org bookmarklet in Firefox.  It flagged a couple of categories as red.  When I fixed the issues I scanned again until everything was green.  An article on Macworld said they got different results in Firefox and Safari.  I used Google Chrome since Safari wasn’t installed.  Sure enough, running the bookmarklet in Chrome flagged a couple more categories with yellow.  There is a note on the ReclaimPrivacy.org front page that I missed.  They recommend Chrome, Safari and IE.  They’re working on the Firefox issue.