Applications and Websites

The next section only contains a couple of important bits, but we’ll cover them all so you don’t miss anything. Applications and Websites controls both applications (such as games or Twitter) that you use within Facebook, as well as how external websites might interact with your data.


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The first option, “What you share,” isn’t really an option at all, but rather a “Learn More” button which attempts to explain this section better. (You can safely ignore this page if you wish, since the kindly folks at MacLife.com are taking the liberty of explaining it all to you.)

“What your friends can share about you” has an Edit Settings button which takes you to yet another page, this time with a list of choices -- probably all checked by default -- determining what your friends can share from your profile. If you’re a paranoid type by nature, you might choose to quickly uncheck all of these choices, but some of them can be useful, depending upon how you use Facebook.



For instance, if you uncheck “My photos” then your friends won’t be able to share your new baby pictures with others. If you like to post informative or humorous links from other websites to your Facebook Wall, you might also want to leave “My links” checked, so your friends have the option of also sharing them. If you don’t want anything you’ve posted on Facebook to leave the site, uncheck all of these options and click “Save Changes.” You feel safer already, don’t you?

The next two settings aren’t really privacy settings per se -- instead, they let you edit any applications you may have blocked or friends you’ve chosen to ignore. If you haven’t done either, you can ignore these; otherwise, you might take a moment to check these lists and make sure you’re not missing out on something you might actually be interested in.

“Activity on Applications and Games Dashboards” is a tongue-twistingly named setting which controls how others can see what you’ve been up to with applications and games your friends have shared. If you tend to kill a lot of time playing games on Facebook when you’re supposed to be working, you might want to adjust this setting so that the fewer people who know about it, the better.



More controversially, we come to Facebook’s new Instant Personalization Pilot Program. Clicking on the Edit Setting button brings you to a page with only one option: “Allow select partners to instantly personalize their features with my public information when I first arrive on their websites.” This setting is checked (and active) by default, and most users should opt to unselect it immediately, since it’s one of the bigger invasions of privacy that Facebook is guilty of so far.

Currently, the “partner sites” are limited to MicrosoftDocs.com, Pandora and Yelp, which pull your personal data to determine what relevant content to display to you. If you don’t use any of these sites, the setting is harmless enough for now -- until Facebook extends the program to others, including sites you might not want to receive any of your public data. While you can opt out of this “experience” on each individual site, it’s probably better to send a message to Facebook by opting out completely so they don’t continue to (potentially) abuse our personal data.

Next page: Search and Block List