Facebook has been suffering recently from all sorts of lawsuits and investigations and complaints about Facebook users’ privacy is being managed. Allegations that Facebook’s Terms of Use is incredibly one-sided, and how users are tricked into giving Facebook private information which is then sold to advertisers and used for spam and other nefarious purposes. If you haven’t seen them, simply Google “Facebook privacy issues” which will return 311 million search results – pick one.
There’s a lot of talk about why you should quit Facebook right now, and how difficult it is to delete your data, and etc etc. But many aren’t doing that simply because they want their games, their pictures, their friends and etc, and of course the main thought here is that “nah who’d want my data anyway, I’m nobody”.
It’s actually very easy to keep all the good stuff , and yet stay somewhat private on Facebook. Here’s how:
1. Never use your personal email to login
This goes without saying. It’s incredibly easy to create a new email on GMail, Y!Mail, Windows Live Mail and many other free email service providers. Spend 10 mins creating a new email with a fake name, fake address, fake everything they ask from you to “create a better user experience”. Then use that email for your Facebook account.
2. Get a secondary SIM card for phone verification
Facebook asks for your phone number now to “verify that you are a real person” or something like that. So instead of conveniently using your real number, simply walk out to the nearest telco retailer, get the cheapest prepaid card you can find (RM8 for DiGi, last we checked – that’s like $2.60 or something) and use that number instead. Surely you can sacrifice today’s Starbucks and half and hour to deprive Facebook forever of your phone number, right?
3. Don’t fill in additional information
Employer information. Education information. Favourite movies. Favourite quotations. Favourite music. Relationship status. Family information. Blog address. IM screen name. Etc etc etc. KEEP IT EMPTY. If you have friends who wanna watch a movie with you and doesn’t know your taste, they can always ask you directly. Else they’re not really friends, are they? All other information is not needed – unless your Facebook profile is for “professional use”, in which case this article isn’t really relevant to you.
4. Resist the urge to share photos with everyone
You had a rockin’ time last weekend at a club. Took a gazillion pictures. Now what? Post them on Facebook, of course, and tag all your friends in it! Next weekend, a holiday getaway. Pictures! Post on Facebook! Two years and a thousand albums later, the whole city knows how you look like, whether you’re hot or not, where you like to club, and what time, where you eat, who your friends are, what clothes you wear, where you work, maybe even where you stay. No. You do NOT share that kinda information. Especially not on Facebook where A picture says a thousand words, so don’t post a thousand pictures. Your friends can have photos via email, YouSendIt, USB file transfer and a myriad of other ways.
Hopefully, these simple steps will deprive Facebook of at least 80% of your private data. There are other steps that you can take to completely wipe Facebook off your private life, but then that would sacrifice your social life on Facebook and is not the purpose of this article.
Do you have other ways of keeping your life private while still enjoying privileges on Facebook?
