Lockdown or Death for Your FaceBook Profile An Advanced User Guide to Social Networking Privacy

If you’re sick and tired of FaceBook’s continual encroachment on your privacy, here’s how to lock it down like a SuperMax prison or give it the Death Penalty.

I finally decided after all of FaceBook’s continual invasions on my personal privacy by sharing data to people and services which I don’t want — and by being completely irresponsible and untrustworthy in terms of computer security — that it was time to lock down my profile and minimize my exposure, while still allowing select people to interact with me on my user Profile.

With FaceBook, this is a very difficult thing to be able to balance, and I’m still not 100 percent sure that I wouldn’t be served by destroying my profile and leaving the service altogether, but I believe that for the time being, I’ve been able to create some sort of “miserable medium” that I can tolerate.

The User Scenario
FaceBook is an extremely complicated and confusing online service to use, with lots of settings that are needed to secure a profile and prevent undesired dissemination of information. Because I no longer trust the service whatsoever, I’ve created a “How-To” for the advanced user for locking down their profile and minimizing their risk

Keep in mind that this Lockdown I created is an extremely draconian method — nobody will be able to share your information or your statuses, you will not have any personally identifying information unless you absolutely chose to, and only the most essential applications will be authorized.

The user for which I have in mind is someone who is extremely concerned about their personal privacy and security, but also may wish to have people contact them via a brand or a business or some other following they maintain.

In this case I created this “Secure FaceBook Systems Architecture” to suit my own personal needs, in order to be able to interact with essential friends and business contacts in my personal profile, but also to allow anyone to interact with me in relation to my two blogs, Tech Broiler and Off The Broiler.

This requires groups of people to be compartmentalized and thus two separate profiles have to be maintained: Your secure personal profile, and also a Public Fan Page. Additionally, this method also provides the ability for centralized Status Updates to both the personal profile and the Fan Page via Twitter, using automatic RSS synchronization.

For those who do not require that level of complexity and only need to maintain a single profile, you can omit the phases for Twitter/Blog Update integration and Fan Page creation.

Share on Facebook