Facebook recently changed its privacy settings and how to access them, and a number of details you may have thought were personal could now be in the public domain. Teacher Support Network beloeves that teachers, like anyone else, have the right to use social networks as forms of self expression, networking and maintaining links with friends and family. However, teachers are also encouraged to maintain a strong work/life balance which we believe involves maintaining a healthy, separate personal life. By default, Facebook may be publishing online information about you that you'd prefer were not visible to head teachers, colleagues, parents or pupils.

On this page we've pulled together a group of resources and advice on how the new privacy settings work and what you may want to do to keep your personal life personal online.

EFF Video Guide to Facebook Privacy Settings

Opting Out of Facebook’s Instant Personalization:
Electronic Frontier Foundation Guide

What is instant personalisation on Facebook? Liz Gannes at the blog gigaom.com has the best summary I've seen about it: "Instant personalization means that if you show up to the Internet radio site Pandora for the first time, it will now be able to look directly at your Facebook profile and use public information — name, profile picture, gender and connections, plus anything else you’ve made public — to give you a personalized experience. So if I have already publicly stated through my Facebook interests page that I like a musical artist — say, The Talking Heads — the first song I hear when I go to Pandora will be a Talking Heads song or something that Pandora thinks is similar."

You may not want your music tastes or activities on other websites doing likewise to enter the public domain. You may want to maintain different online identities on different websites for any number of reasons.

Many people would prefer to opt in to a service on an individual basis instead of opting out of things that are set up automatically, which could give people a better sense of control and ownership of their online identity. If you're unsure of what something does, it's best to turn it off until you know exactly what it's doing.

You can opt out from automatic personalisation which will stop 3rd party websites you visit from collecting your Facebook profile information (should they be doing that) by taking the following steps:

• Click "Account" (upper right corner of screen of your profile page).
• Select "Privacy Settings."
• Click on "Applications and Websites."
• Next to the heading "Instant Personalization Pilot Program" click on "edit setting."
• On that page you'll see a tick box next to the statement "Allow select partners to instantly personalize their features with my public information when I first arrive on their websites." Make sure you untick that box if you want to deactivate that tool.
• Click the "Applications and Websites" button at top to save your changes.
  
  

Going further

If you're still concerned about these services there are further steps you can take. Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation has published a guide which we can share with you under a Creative Commons license:

• Go to the Instant Personalization privacy setting and uncheck the "Allow" button. Click confirm. Come back to this page.
• Go to the page for Microsoft Docs, click Block Application on the page, click Block Application on the pop-up, and click Okay on the next pop-up. Come back to this page.
• Go to the page for Pandora, click Block Application on the page, click Block Application on the pop-up, and click Okay on the next pop-up. Come back to this page.
• Go to the page for Yelp , click Block Application on the page, click Block Application on the pop-up, and click Okay on the next pop-up. Come back to this page.
• Optional: Go to the Facebook Site Governance page, and express your opinion in a comment.
  
  

Other Privacy Settings

There may be some other elements of your Facebook profile that you'd like to only share with your friends or perhaps only certain people among your friends.

Go back to your Facebook privacy settings and optimise the following settings:

• Personal Information and Posts
• Contact Information
• Friends, Tags and Connections

In the subcategories under these, you can choose who can see the information you've included. You can opt between Everyone, Friends and networks, Friends of Friends, Friends, or custom settings.

Check these as well:

• Applications and Websites
  
• Search
  
• Block List

We've looked at one aspect under Applications and Websites already. But here you can also choose what your friends can share about you as well. You can also block other Facebook and third party applications that you don't want obtaining your information. You can slo set different people to ignore "invitations" form if you're getting too many from some people. Under Activity on "Applications and Games Dashboards" you can reduce the number of people who see what games your playing or what other tools you sign up to.

Under Search you can determine who can find you not just on Facebook, but on other web search engines. If you don't want your Facebook profile to be found on Google, you can set this here. If you don't want people to find you on Facebook unless they are a friend of a freind, that can also be changed here. You can also make it so no one can search for you.

The Block List is what it sounds like. If there's someone you don't want to see you, then you can block them when they're logged in to Facebook. However, you want to control what you make public, because when they aren't logged in they'll be able to see whatever you have open to everyone.
Block List.

Resources

AllFacebook has a fantastic, easy to use guide called 10 Privacy Settings All Facebook Users Should Know. It offers an easy guide (with pictures) on how to keep apsects of your Facebook profile off limits to some, but not others.

The EFF's Top 12 Ways to Protect Yourself Online is also great reading and incredibly useful for Facebook and any number of other things you do on the internet.