Basic Facebook Security

I joined Facebook somewhat reluctantly months ago to simply understand the security and how it works since my wife had joined and started asking questions. I have, like many others, since become somewhat addicted, and enjoy it. I have been looking into basic security measures since I have found so many old friends whose profiles were completely open for public viewing, so I could browse all their photos, posts and everything before even friending them. The troubling part is I would tell them and they generally had no idea.

In this post I will discuss the basics of Facebook security, securing your profile from different areas of the site. Using these wisely can keep you out of search results, limit what is shown in search results, and keep your information private, or, as private as you want it to be. It's worth understanding.

The first thing you do is roll over the "Settings" link and select the "Privacy Settings" link that appears in the drop down menu, from there you are in the security/privacy configuration area of your Facebook profile. There are four basic areas of configuration.

• Profile - Setting who can see what in your profile.
• Search - Setting your search visibility.
• News Feed and Wall - Setting what appears on your wall and your friends walls/home pages.
• Applications - Setting what applications can see of your profile, which apps you've blocked and so on.

The bulk of the configuration options are set with a drop down menu that allows you to choose visibility of any piece of information set to "only friends", "networks and friends", "friends of friends", "no one" and one other option labeled "customize...". All except the last option are very self-explanatory. The final "customize..." option, when selected, opens a dialog box which allows for very granular security to be set to the piece of info being configured. it allows you to set the same "friends", "friends of friends", etc, options for viewing, plus the network options, and, additionally, you can exclude specific friends from being able to view it. So anyplace this is available you can opt to hide this info from one friends but not another. Which could be handy for info like phone numbers and such.

Profile Privacy

Clicking through to the profile privacy section you have two basic tabs of settings, basic, and contact info. All of the options are set using the drop down menu described above. This is pretty simple to set for basic security, as all the options can easily be set to "friends only" and your profile will basically not have anything visible to people that are not friends, but may have clicked through to your profile from a friends profile.

Search

This can be a powerful area to control the privacy of your profile. If you are the type that wants to find, but not be found, simply set the search visibility (the first option on the page at the time of this writing) to "no one" or "friends only". These settings will allow you to keep yourself out of search results for people that are not friends already. Below that drop down menu option there is a series of checkboxes that will enable/disable what actually shows up in search results when you are found. You can hide your profile picture, friends list and other various things.

News Feed and Wall

This page of options allows you to set which activity is published to your wall. By default Facebook shows every time you comment to somebody else's wall, comment on photos, start playing a game and all sorts of stuff. This can be shut off in the first tab of this page.

The second tab is the ever controversial use of people profile info and images in ads all over Facebook. I know I got weirded out the first time I saw an ad that had pics of my friends saying they challenged me to some such quiz or whatever. Well, in the "Facebook Ads" tab you can turn this off so your profile can not be used in those ads. Or only for friend, friends of friends, etc.

Applications

For many Facebook users, these applications can be the bane of their existence. The home page being filled with friends results of all these "what [insert whatever] are you?" quizes and such stuff. Many of these quizes are so poorly created they have typos, erroneous information, meaningless questions and more.

There are actually a few ways to handle this, first is with the "Settings > Privacy Settings > Applications" window. From here you can say exactly what information applications can have access to, lists blocked applications, and allows you to disable viewing of Facebook Connect sites and Beacon sites. Facebook connect is a way to use your Facebook profile information in other web sites that subscribe to the Facebook Connect service. Beacon web sites can be learned about here.

Additionally there is the "Settings > Application Settings" which contains a list of any application you have used, and allows you to set permissions and visibility for each application.

Lastly, if you have those friends that send you every quiz, smiles, hugs, drinks, gifts and whatnot and you don't want those things all the time, on your list of requests, under each request is a link to block that application. Then future requests simply won't be delivered. Sadly, there isn't a global block that I have found, so there are days I spend too much time blocking stuff, but that's one of those necessary evils. Everyone uses Facebook for their own reasons, some to play games and whatnot, some just to chat with people.

SBCGlobal Needs a Butt Kickin!

Over the last few days, of course while I go on vacation, I find out traffic to my most successful web site dropped by about 2/3. Being on vacation I had communication limited to hotel rooms morning and night and during those times I do as much as possible to talk to my host, other site admins, run trace routes and so on.

Come to find out, after 3 or 4 days that the problem is a huge internet connection company called SBCGlobal. My web site partner was doing a lot of legwork while I was out of town and talks to Mediacom as a way to start hunting down the issue and ends up finding out that SBCGlobal who is the connectivity backbone for Mediacom, AOL, AT&T and many more large providers are interfering with connectivity with anyone whose IP address was 173.*.*.* from connecting to my web site, and supposedly many others. I hadn't found another as yet.

Mediacom had been working on it for about a week, only the last few days has it spread to a wider audience, which eventually started affecting mine.

Traffic is dropping, visitors are getting frustrated, two advertisers have contacted me about not being able to reach my sites/their scripts and one even threatening me for breaking contract. So I am dealing with them, explaining what is going on while otherwise sitting on my hands waiting for the issue to be resolved.

Mediacom is, from what I heard, preparing legal action for SBCGlobal's inaction on this issue.

I hope Mediacom takes them to the cleaners.

The reason for this post, other than to vent, is that if your web site is having connectivity issues, have your visitors run a trace route of their connection to your domain and look at the results. If it chokes at an SBCGlobal, AT&T, AOL, Mediacom or related servers, odds are you are affected by this issue.

Ad Publishing Guilt

I was chatting with a new friend yesterday that is in a very common dilemma. He has put a lot of time and effort into a web site, see's traffic increasing, and would like to find a way to get a little payback from all the time and energy that it takes to keep it going. In a conflicting emotion, he hates ads being splattered all over web sites and doesn't want to do that.

Ad publishing guilt isn't uncommon, but, it needn't be a problem if the publishing is done right.

The trick, as I see it, is to make the advertisements a reasonable part of the content, meaning, running ads for things that your visitors could appreciate. Affiliate marketing is available for almost everyone in any niche'. If you run a web site about cooking, affiliate with a kitchen supply store and sell pots, pans and mixers, or affiliate with Amazon.com and sell recipe books, earning commissions on those sales.

Google AdSense and Microsoft adCenter have the unique ability to adapt their ads to relate to the contents of the web page. Many ad systems ask you what the topic of your site is, and leave it at that. Google and Microsoft index the content of your page, pull out stop words (and, of, or, not, etc) and analyze the rest of the content for keywords and show ads from advertisers that bid on those keywords.

It does take some time for them to index your web site, so for a few days the new publisher may get some weird ads, and some words are hard to analyze (is it a bass guitar or a bass fish, for example) but on the whole, I have found it to be pretty impressive. In one example that always stands out in my head, somebody started a forum discussion about some musician that had just died, talked about his contributions to music, guitar playing, etc. All the ads on the page were for guitars, recording gear, buying online music, etc; as conversation continued it came out he died from a drug overdose and people started talking about that. Within a few hours ads for rehabilitation centers and hydroponic grow systems start showing up. Pretty amazing.

So, the moral of the story is that if it's done right, the ads can actually be useful to the visitor.

Lastly, one of the worst things to come from the internet is that it conditioned people to think everything should be free, and immediate during the boom of the dot com era. That is not the case any longer, as dot com also had a bust. Whether it's a web site or a magazine, there are human beings behind it spending time and energy to bring that information to you, and they deserve to have some compensation for that effort.

The key is balance, don't have your entire first screen view be nothing but ads, don't have popup after popup, popunder after popunder, annoying expanding Flash ads, surprise audio playback and that sort of thing. Be respectful of the visitor, provide them something they can possibly use or appreciate, and make a few dollars doing it.

eBay Partner Network

As I stated in a previous post, I did recently join the eBay Partner Network. This system is a way for a web site owner to publish ads on their sites for auctions that are currently running on eBay and get commissions for referral sales.

The tools themselves are pretty cool, they have a lot of options for using their web services via the supplied API, Flash ad generator, link rewriting and more. I have mostly used the Flash ad; it will accept keywords to pull up related auction content. I have not yet used the API, but am hoping to find the time to dig into it.

One thing I like is the fact the publisher is subscribed to all the eBay properties. The US, UK and all the other properties they have. That lends itself well to geolocating visitors and showing them ads related to where they are. If you see a visitor is from the Netherlands, you certainly don't want to show them UK eBay auctions. I discussed this in more detail in my previous post about geolocating.

Overall, however, the revenue really isn't there yet. I have talked to other webmasters that have outstanding luck with eBay, making more from it than any other single ad provider. I can't say that is true for me. Thus far it's generated little more than a typical CPM ad system that puts flashing and jumping "you are a winner!" ads all over your web site...which we all know are terrible paying ads.

I can't say I recommend eBay myself, yet, but I am going to find the time to give the API a chance, and hopefully format my own text-based ads, which seem to perform better for me. So time will tell.