One of the most visited posts on my blog is titled “FaceBook:Do you know who is watching you?” which details how to keep your Facebook profile out of the public eye. In light of the MI6 chief/Facebook scandal (his wife obviously doesn’t read my blog), I thought I’d update the instructions so you can avoid suffering a similar embarrassment

1. Log in to Facebook and from the Settings menu (top right of the page) select Privacy Settings
2. Now select the Profile section (alternatively click on this link: http://www.facebook.com/privacy/?view=profile&tab=basic)
3. Set all the options to Only Friends and click on the Save Changes button
4. Now select the Contact Information tab (or follow this link: http://www.facebook.com/privacy/?view=profile&tab=contact)
5. Once again set all the options to Only Friends and click on the Save Changes. If you don’t want your friends to know your email then you can select No one as the option for your email address too.
6. Click on the Privacy part of the breadcrumb at the top of the page and the select the Search section (or follow this link: http://www.facebook.com/privacy/?view=search)
7. For the Search Visibility option you have a couple of choices. If you are completely a paranoid set it to Only Friends. If you are slightly paranoid then set it to Friends of Friends. If you don’t care then select one of the other options such as Everyone.
8. In the Search Result section you can control what people can see when they do search for you. I would suggest leaving only the A link to add me as a friend and A link to send me a message options selected. You can also turn on My profile picture but it all depends on how compromising your profile pictures get
9. Lastly in the Public Search Listing section uncheck the create a public search listing for me… option because you don’t want your profile showing up on Google.
10. Click on Save Changes and you are all done.

Happy Facebooking…

Google has just updated its advertising system to do “behavioral targeting”, in essence they track you as you move around the web and display ads that are targeted towards you based on what the perceive are your interests.

For instance if you visit a bunch of sports related sites then Google will determine that you are into sports and serve up sports related ads to you.

This is all done using tracking cookies and is built around the Doubleclick tracking infrastructure.

Google have also asked anyone who displays Google ads on their to update their privacy policy information. Since I display Google ads on this blog  (and make 0 dollars to be honest, why don’t you click on some of the ads?) here is my updated privacy policy:

We use third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our website. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address, or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you.

You are warned

More importantly what if you don’t want to be tracked ?

Well Google has two pages for you. The first lets you opt-out of the tracking system and the second lets you adjust your Google Ads preferences.

The preferences page is a particularly interesting, in that it shows you the “interest” areas that Google has derived based on your surfing habits. You can also manually add interest areas if you want!

My advice however is to just use a browser add-on such as Adblock Plus for Firefox and you will never have to worry about seeing those ads ever again (you will however disable the blocker for rabidgremlin.com, won’t you? )