Privacy Issues on Facebook and Stalker Problems

This blog is only my opinion and my thoughts but as far as I can see Facebook have handed it on a plate to all possible stalkers.

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Stalkers can now see every single thing their victim does on there.  Every single Like, every single comment, who they befriend (I know they could see that bit before but now they can see it in real time).

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There are posts going round asking by lots of people asking everyone to un-tick their “Likes and Comments” because they don’t want everyone to see their every move and rightly so but it is up to all their friends to do that.  I know I have done that with all my friends and it has thankfully slowed my Ticker right down and now I only really see what the pages I have Liked have recently added, instead of the very fast flow of all my friends every comment and Like as well as their posts.   

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I know we all have the choice of who we befriend but how many times do you hear of a stalker being in the peripherals of your friends so you could easily be “friends” with a possible stalker without realising it.  So many of us have huge amounts of friends on Facebook and we certainly don’t know all of them well as they are often just Facebook friends that we wouldn’t even know if we passed them in the street.  It must be paradise for a stalker if they can see everywhere you are going, what you are going to be wearing, all your thoughts you tell friends, all your photos, all the things you like and your tastes in everything, all your moans and all your tittle-tattle.  Unless these are done in Private Messages they are there for all to see.   It makes it very easy for a possible stalker to slide into your life without you realising as they could pretend to like all the things you like.  It is just putting it all there in front of them for them to be able to use and abuse.  Instead of allowing your friends to un-tick your “Likes and Comments” they should make it that you yourself tick them if you are happy for others to see them.  I doubt in anyone would tick them.  It seems they are trying to make the new Facebook a totally “Open Book”.

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I think this leaves a huge hole in the privacy issue and this doesn’t even touch on the facts that are now coming to light, according to all the social media experts, that Facebook now tracks all our website moves outside of Facebook as well, whether we are logged into Facebook or not.  They know that most of us stay logged on to Facebook all day as we all suffer from FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) and even if not, we are on other sites so wouldn’t erase our cookies after leaving Facebook until we turn the computer off, which some people never ever do anyway.  They are saying that they are not selling this information but why would they track all our moves otherwise?  It seems a lot of wasted resources if they don’t intend to do anything with the information they are gathering.  I would like to think they are putting it to good use in filtering out paedophiles or terrorists etc.  with some suitable algorithm but I am sure if there was a way to do that then it wouldn’t be Facebook needing to do it but some security agency.  This seems a rather “Big Brother” issue to me (and I don’t mean the TV programme)!  This is seriously infringing on our privacy.  I read recently about “Don’t write anything you wouldn’t want read out in court” and adding “Don’t go to any sites you wouldn’t want to be shown in court” or something similar.  I think they should also add “Don’t make any comments you wouldn’t say to a whole room full of your friends and enemies”.  I guess we should always weigh up if what we want to say should be in a Private Message or should we just go back to emails instead? 

Just remember BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING so be very very careful what you say and to whom as it is all logged down and may come back to bite you!

Please let me know your thoughts on this.

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Todays snippet of trivia:

111,111,111     x     111,111,111   =   12,345,678,987, 654,321

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And todays chuckle:

OLD FRIENDS
Two elderly ladies had been friends for many decades.

Over the years, they had shared all kinds of activities and adventures.

Lately, their activities had been limited to meeting a few times a week to play cards.
One day, they were playing cards when one looked at the other and said, "Now don't get mad at me... I know we've been friends for a long time but I just can't think of your name.. I've thought and thought, but I can't remember it. Please tell me what your name is."
Her friend glared at her.

For at least three minutes she just stared and glared at her.

Finally she said, "How soon do you need to know?"

5 Tips on How to Like pages and add friends on Facebook without risk of receiving a ban.

I thought I would some more Facebook tips today, especially for those with business pages.

1.     Only add 5 new friends a day – always write a message for each request and keep each message worded differently

2.     Only Like 5 new pages a day and, unless you need to, don’t add a message on their wall

3.     If you do want to Like someone’s page and let them know about you, then don’t add a link at that stage, just say from @(your business name) – this is known as tagging.  You can always add a link to your website or a product at another time.  If they Like you back, then they will automatically get the posts you add to your own page.

4.     Only leave the maximum of 5 links a day on other people’s walls

5.     Only add up to 5 posts a day on your own business wall so that people don’t get fed up of all your posts and Unlike you.

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You can go over these safe limits, but if you do take it slowly and spread them throughout the day.  If you get a warning stop immediately and “lay low” for a day or so by not Liking people or adding friends but you can join in wall discussions or add posts as normal to your business page.  Adding 5 a day is better than adding 20 and then being banned for 15 days (which seems to be the current ban time).

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If you do “normal” things in between like using the wall for posts and answering messages or joining in with other comments then FB classes that as “normal activity” but if you only ever add friends or Like people then it hits the FB algorithm which flags up that you are indulging in spamming activities.  It doesn’t have exceptions for the new people who want to add loads of friends as it is merely a machineJ

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Presumably the more you are on FB and join in with everything else then you could probably Like and befriend people a lot more than this as it would still seem like normal activity.

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You also have to remember that if you Like too many people too quickly and leave a post, then even before you would get a warning, FB classes your posts as spam and send them to Hidden Posts anyway so they aren’t even seen the recipient.

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Another thing to realise is that too many unanswered, ignored or refused friends requests also come to the FB algorithms attention which is another reason not to ask too many too quickly as there will be too many outstanding.

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I learnt these things the hard way as I received a couple of bans when I first started on Facebook because I did not realise what I should and should not do, so hopefully I can prevent you falling into the same trap.

5 points on How to Understand Facebook Basics.

Usernames, Tagging and Liking.

I gave a few pointers in another blog a few days ago about business pages but here are some basic queries answered.  If you are new to Facebook you may want to see those earlier blogs as well after you have read this one:

1. Register Your Username  Get your own URL (website username) for your personal page.  You can now get a username for your own page as well as a business page, so get yours while there is one available close to your name, for instance mine is www.facebook.com/suzy.jenkins.  This is very useful if you want to add it to any paperwork or a website as you have your own URL (rather than my messy LinkedIn username – see below - this is typical of what your Facebook username looks like now if you don’t register it.  It is FREE, so take advantage of it.  Go to http://www.facebook.com/username and follow the instructions.

2. Register Your Business Username  Get your own URL for your business page when you have reached 25 Fans (which is another name for Likes on business pages).   But first see “5.Choosing A Username” below.  Once again go to http://www.facebook.com/username when you have at least 25 Fans on your business page.  It seems a lot of Fans to be able to get but it doesn’t take long if you ask your family and friends to “Like” your page.  It is best to give them a direct link to your page and tell them to click the Like button at the top of your page, as it is surprising how many people just think you have to just click Like in the comments section (which is actually Liking the comment and NOT your business page).  When on your business page copy the www bit at the top of your page and paste it to a message to send them and ask them to go to the page and click the Like button by your page name at the top.   This then registers and show how many Likes (Fans) you have (half way down on the left) where it says the number above “people like this”

3. Tagging  This can only be used when you have registered your username and is a useful direct link to your page.  A tag (or tagging) is when you put @ followed by your name or business name (no space after the @ sign).  Therefore mine is @pendant-heaven.  As you type the first couple of letters a drop-down box will appear and you click into your name.  Type more letters if your name isn’t showing straight away.  For instance I have to type @pe usually to see my name and sometimes @pen.  When it appears in the post it doesn’t have the @ sign but just your name which will turn blue after you have sent the post.  This means anyone can click directly into that name which will then take them to your page.  If you see a blue name like that in any post just click it and it will take you direct to their page.  This is very useful if you see someone or a page you may be interested in as you can go direct to them. 

4. Liking Pages  You will need to Like another business page from your Personal Page for it to count as a Like (Fan) on their page – Likes from business pages are not counted. 

The same goes for you – if you want a Like to add a count on your business page make sure your friend (or whoever) Likes your page from their Personal Page, otherwise it wont add to your Fan count – this is especially important when you are new and want to get to that magic 25 to get your own URL.

5. Choosing a Username  A point here about choosing your URL – you cannot change it once you have picked it, so think carefully while waiting for those 25 Fans and make sure you pick a name you definitely want and will want to keep.  It is best to always choose a memorable name for a business and not something that is just initials as no-one can ever remember them, for instance I could have chosen S.J. Jewellery.  It is probably best to not just make up a weird unmemorable name like Flixonatic as again people will forget it.  I am not saying mine is a good name but hopefully it is more memorable than some.  The only problem I have found is that I chose a name with a hyphen in it when I opened my ArtFire studio, which is absolutely fine on there, but when I got to registering the name on Facebook, Twitter, Blogger etc. I had to use multiple variations, as a hyphen couldn’t be used on all of them.  Some only allow a dot, some nothing at all to separate the words which ended up a bit confusing.  So, as you can see, this is how mine ended up on all the different sites:

Artfire:                      www.pendant-heaven.artfire.com

Facebook:               www.facebook.com/Pendant.Heaven

Twitter:                     www.twitter.com/PendantHeaven

Blog:                        www.pendant-heaven.blogspot.com

LinkedIn:                  http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/suzanne-jenkins/35/b98/bb3

Kaboodle:               pendantheaven

Networked Blogs:    http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blog/pendant_heaven

Google+                  https://plus.google.com/101544238620721926724/posts

You can see that there is a lot to be said for either using one word for a name, or if you choose 2 or more words it would probably be best to just separate them out by adding the capital letters at the beginning of each word (as in my Twitter name) which I presume would then be quite universal in all of them.  And no, the reason I didn’t do that myself is because I didn’t realise until after I had been using ArtFire for a while and then joined Facebook that it would cause a problem, so it was too late by then.  But you have the chance to learn by my mistake J

Oh and did you know that if you click Facebook (top left) or Home (top right) it will take you back to your Home page (or wall).

I will be adding another Facebook help blog soon so if you don’t want to miss it become one of my followers.

Facebook Personal Page and Business Page - My Basic Beginners Guide…..for new users with a business page

OK now this is my interpretation of what I have learnt – and anyone is welcome to tell me if I have got it wrong.  But since I first started on Facebook a whole 2 months ago (which now makes me an expert – LOL – I don’t think!!!) I have been really struggling with getting to grips with understanding how it all works.  I still have some (many probably) unanswered questions but as it has taken me 2 months to get this far I thought this may help some of the brand new people because I would have loved to have found something readable and understandable when I first started – which I hope this will be – well, it may not be understandable but at least it will be basic.  I found a lot of things were very confusing but my biggest problem was in understanding the subject I am going to discuss today – the different pages on Facebook.  So if you are brand new and have been clever enough to have found my blog then I hope this may help to clear the muddy waters in front of you and I will try to put it in a way that is understandable (LOL- maybe!).

The whole Personal Page/ News Feed & Wall Page / Business Page thing is really confusing but I have sussed it out to be like this – think of it as 2 bedrooms with a Jack n Jill bathroom – you know the ones – 3 rooms in a row – a bathroom in the middle and a bedroom each side.  Now this bathroom can only be used by EITHER Jack OR Jill and not both at once.  You are of course both Jack & Jill but Jack is your Personal Page and Jill is your Business Page.  Are you keeping up with all this???  Right so to confirm, bedroom 1 (Jacks) is your Personal Page, the bathroom is your News Feed & Wall and bedroom 2 (Jills) is your Business Page.  Which means when you are on your Personal Page and want to go to your Business Page you have to SWAP pages to use the Wall (bathroom).  So go to Accounts (top right) and in the drop down box click USE FACEBOOK AS PAGE, then a big box comes up that says

 New! Select Switch to get a newsfeed and notifications for that page. You'll also be able to interact with other pages as your page. Learn more

with a button that says SWITCH - click the button.  You should now be in the bathroom again but from the Business side so you can use News Feed and the Wall as your Business Page.  When using your Business Page, the Wall is for things you post (message) - unless anyone sends a link from their page to yours which then shows on your Wall as well.  The News Feed is all the incoming stuff or things you have either started or joined in with on the New Feed wall.  It’s pretty much like News Feed is your chat room for everyone with back and forth messages and your Wall is like the school blackboard that only you as the teacher can write on.  You only have one Wall so you can only use it EITHER with your Personal Page OR with your Business Page.

When on your Business Page you want to go back to your Personal Page then go to Accounts in the top right again and in the drop down box click the middle one with your photo that says your Personal Page name (it also says “switch bank to (your name)” under it as well.  And voila, you are back on your Personal Page and can use the Wall as your Personal Page.

If you LIKE other peoples pages then anything they write or put on their Business Wall will show in your News Feed.  Equally if anyone LIKES your business page then they will see the stuff you add to your Business Wall in their News Feed.  Right, now I had better just mention this so as to clarify it, Like is another name for Fan on business pages.   If you don’t want a particular advert (well that tends to be what they are – messages showing what they have for sale) on your News Feed then you can hover your cursor over the “advert” and a little sun/star thing comes up in the top corner of the advert which you can click and it gives you the option to hide that particular “Post” (this is what they actually call them) or to hide all posts from that person /company or you can report it as spam if you feel it shouldn’t be there at all.  This will then go into your “Hidden Posts” on the left of your page.  You can always go into the Hidden Posts to reinstate it if you wish.  You may also find some posts arrive straight into the Hidden Posts as well – some of these are purely because the sender has sent a lot that day or for any other strange reason that Facebook has thought of them as spam and so hidden them from you – but they may be posts you actually would like in your News Feed so if you want to see them, hover your mouse over the little sun/star thing on the top right of the advert or comment and it will give you options to reinstate it to your page again.

I am sure I have made this sound as clear as mud and just as complicated as any other instructions you find but I just hope I have put it in a slightly more understandable fashion???  It is easier to refer back to it as you get used to things on Facebook as it then becomes clearer.

If you have any questions then please send me a comment or message.

Right so as not to make this too long, I think I had better split these so-called lessons into basic sections too so this is the end (unless I think of any more) on the whole Personal Page / News Feed & Wall / Business Page bit but I will explain what I have learnt about the actual Walls & News Feed themselves in another blog in a couple of days time as it save boring my followers (few that they are so far) but thanks to those who are following – I can only get better J

How NOT to organise friends into sections on Facebook…..

Make sure you put your friends into LISTS via Edit Friends – being totally new I had absolutely no idea how to do it and being a total plonker I put some of my friends into groups without even realising I was starting a “Group” instead of putting my friends into categories.  I know most of you are thinking “what a wally” as you worked out how to do it straight away but as I was totally new to both personal and business pages in one go (and social media in general) I had to learn a lot of things the hard way in a very short time and some of them got me into trouble!  Finding any understandable help that wasn’t written in “computer nerd language” seemed impossible and I couldn’t find any basic instructions for the average person who needed it in layman’s terms.  So I did what I could and learned by my mistakes….the trouble is I am still learning by my mistakes!  I keep saying I am going to write a bog-standard start instructions for new facebook people while I remember my basic questions and answers, so I promise to try by the end of the week.

Back to adding friends - as I tried to add so many friends when I first started (the reason I first received a ban! … more on that tomorrow), I had lots of friends acceptances coming in about the same time so my list built quickly and I thought I had better group them before they got out of hand, so I went for the Group option thinking that was the way – oops!  I should have tumbled that I had done it wrong as a few people had said “Thank you for inviting me into the Group” but I just thought that fb lets them know when I had regrouped them and so I had no idea that I had managed to start three groups.  I had sort of forgotten all about it and thought I would get round to it one day when I had got on top of this social media thing with all the other bookmarking sites as well.  But yesterday I had a sudden reminder as someone asked to join one of my so-called groups – my Bear Lovers Group.  Oooh what to do now???  As I had spoken to her about bears before I put her in the picture but still haven’t decided what I should do about my Groups!

Being a total maniac bear collector I had put other bear collectors in one group and my relatives and close friends in another.  As other friends requests and my friends acceptances came in, as well as contacts from Facebook, LinkedIn etc. I just got bogged down and didn’t do anything with them and thought I would deal with them later, especially as some people I only “knew” by their business name rather than their personal name so I needed to go through them properly when I had time.  Well a couple of  hundred friends later I still haven’t done anything about it so now it is such a mammoth task I never seem to have the time to do it at all. Unless you know something different than I have found, it is not that it is that easy to do either, as when I looked at separating them into lists (not to self - must think lists now and not groups!!!) I have to think of the persons name to start with before I can even put the first letters in to bring up the person to add to the list.  Well I must say my memory is not as good as it was and trying to think this way is just plain awkward.  Why can’t I just click each name going through the list and add them to my own lists???  Considering I knew I should be sorting them into lists as they came in – why haven’t I started doing it yet?!!!  Well, because people aren’t always on facebook all the time and don’t always accept your invite straight away.  So by the time their acceptance comes in I am often too busy at the time to deal with it or I have forgotten who they are to even know which list to put them into!  I don’t suppose this happens at all to people who have a personal page first and then add a business page, because their closer contacts are already in groups (no – note to self again – think lists, lists, lists – must remember to not think of them as groups!!!!) so they know that new ones coming in are inevitably business contacts so all go into one list.

I have a few friends who go to a psychic development circle so when I used the group name Circle for all my close circle of relatives and friends they had thought it was great that I had added them to the Circle Group.  I suppose the others friends and relatives in my Circle Group had no idea what it meant in the spiritual context, so never queried why I had added them to a new group called Circle.  I find a lot of people who only use Facebook for socialising with their friends only know the bare basics and work on a need-to-know basis, so they didn’t even query the fact that they now seemed to be in a Group.

I couldn’t decide on the names of other groups I wanted to put other people in – I did start one called Contacts and fully intended to put people in there who were purely contacts and not necessarily people I chatted with at all, but the dividing line seemed blurred as to who should go into that group or an inbetween group, so I had only ever put the one poor person in there until I worked out what other names I should give my groups.  That person has never asked why they are the only member – they probably just think I have outcast them!!  It is probably a good job in a way that I didn’t have time to set up all the other groups to put people in as I would have a number of groups running instead of just the three.  Hmm, but what do I do with those three???  Now, telling the single person in the Contacts Group is reasonably easy and the Circle group wont be too bad as I know them all well obviously, but the Bear Lovers Group - hmm well I need to explain and somehow disband this other Group that I have stupidly started or do I just let it run???  I don’t even know what is involved in running a Group.  I have to decide what to do now since someone has asked to join it, so I might get more people asking – ooh dear!  Do Groups run themselves – are they just a group of like minded people who speak to each other – or do I have to do anything with it?  What a silly predicament to get myself into as soon as I join Facebook!