Hamburg, April 18: Social network users should behave like a snooty country club when it comes to setting up profiles: “Invitation only!” That means limiting access to information to friends and family, not random surfers.
The German Press Agency dpa recently created accounts with several popular social networks and checked out how to adjust the privacy. The key question: How private are the profiles of new users and by extension those who haven’t adjusted their settings yet?
Facebook: The privacy settings are on the upper right of the page under “Account.” Clicking on “Privacy Settings” as a new member quickly makes clear that a good deal of information, including relationship status (“single” or “in a relationship”), is visible to everyone. Photos or videos posted to your own profile are only visible to friends and their friends. Not strict enough for your taste? There are ways to tighten things up.
Start with “Applications and websites” and the item “What your friends can share about you.” This lets you control which profile information is available for applications – including providers of greeting cards, for example. By default the access rights are quite generous. “Search” plays a central role here: Remove the checkmark by “Public search results” or your “everyone” data will also appear on search engine indexing.
Xing: Users of the business networking site are not subjected to personalised advertising. That may reflect the fact that the network allows basic users for free, but charges for the convenient premium membership.
The privacy settings are found by clicking on “Start” in the green menu bar to the far left and then “Settings.” New profiles on the website are wide open at first. They can be indexed by search engines and viewed by non-members.
On the flip side: Xing’s mission is to facilitate career networking, which by definition includes people that you don’t know yet. Anyone chasing that promise of endless new contacts will likely have no problem with the transparency. And for those who do: just remember to restrict the access rights.
Bottom line on these and other social networks: spend some time rooting through the options in your profile to see exactly which information is publicly available.
–Agencies