How To Better Secure Your Facebook Profile

Due to another recent scare for Facebook users of their profile information being compromised, here are a few ways to secure your profile.

1. If you quit, delete first

For those of us who have decided to leave Facebook, or plan on doing so, please do remember that Facebook does not delete your profile information for you. All those wild and crazy photos, all your personal information, and everything else you’ve put on the site for whatever reason will remain there. If you’re sure you want to quit, delete everything you can find, especially anything personal or embarrassing you wouldn’t want a stranger to see. Also, do remember, your deactivated account isn’t deleted right away. The information will there until Facebook finally gets around to removing it. Plus, if you try to access your Facebook profile even once in any way, it will reactivate and you’ll have to send the request all over again.

2. Don’t “Like” everything

Facebook users have a tendency sometimes to become a kid in a candy shop each time they see a “Like” suggestion that they actually like. Just know, when you click you “Like” something, not only you know, but everybody knows. Anyone from your family to potential employers will have the low down on your interests, so you might want to reconsider clicking on Like S&M when you see it.

3. Get Privacy From Your Apps

Pretty much every user uses at least one app on Facebook, from the casual visitor to the everyday die-hard. Apps can either see everything or nothing about you. That information can be potentially used for anything the app maker desires. Luckily, you can see which apps have access to your information, and select which ones you want to have that ability.

To select which apps have access to your information go to Settings > Application Settings, and from there go to Authorized on the drop-down menu and make your changes there.

4. Stay Out of Ads

You don’t need to put yourself in third-party ads. If you do, you can end up as one of those cut-out faces on the before and after photos(usually the before). If you want to avoid instances like this, go to Privacy > News Feed and Wall > Facebook Ads and turn off the feature. For the ads that just your friends get to see, i.e. the Likes, Finding a Friend through Search, etc., that can also be changed here too.

5. Private Your Profile

If you want to limit the accessibility anyone has to your profile information, just make it private.

Under Settings > Privacy Settings > Profile, go to the drop-down menu for each item and select “Friends Only” to protect your information from anyone not on your friends list. You can also customize it to only allow specific friends to have access to that information as well.

These are all great precautions to take to best prevent yourself and your information from exposure to random creeps and thieves. Hopefully this gives you a better understanding of how to secure your profile better too.

If you have any other suggestions about how to protect your Facebook information, or just want to say thanks and that you liked the post, please tell me via comments. Thanks!

100 Million Facebook Profiles Available To Download

A few months back, there was a huge plan by many users to up and leave Facebook due to security issues. Nothing happened. Many people stayed on Facebook, myself included, ignoring the possible scare of having their information stolen and used for any means someone would want. As of a short while ago, Facebook users, myself included, can see the repercussion of leaving their personal information made available on Facebook.

Ron Bowes of Skull Security has an active 2.8GB torrent download up and running now that has over 100 million Facebook users’ public profile information to view, including names, photos and videos, all sorts of profile information, and even friends. Some people who think they’ve totally secured their profiles to prevent incidents like or closely remote to this aren’t even totally out of the clear.

Done as a scare intent to Facebook users, Bowes had this to say:

“…this is a scary privacy issue. I can find the name of pretty much every person on Facebook…Once I have the name and URL of a user, I can view, by default, their picture, friends, information about them, and some other details. If the user has set their privacy higher, at the very least I can view their name and picture. So, if any searchable user has friends that are non-searchable, those friends just opted into being searched, like it or not!”

While Facebook has repeatedly said over the past few months that they’re working on beefing up security for their users, by  allowing users to hide their profiles from being publicly searched, not allowing profiles for use in ads, and changing privacy levels from strangers and even friends, no one is clear out of the woods yet with Bowes’ evidence. And while they seem as tedious measures to take, Facebook users should consider securing their profiles the best they can if they mind other people trying to use it for whatever means they see fit. Do you want to see your face in a porn ad on some site?

Facebook has not issued any response to this, but we might hear something from them soon if they catch too much flack for this.

Do you think it’s about time you left Facebook, or do you see this as a non-threat? Share your thoughts,

Youtube Upload Limit Upped To 15 Minutes

In a move many Youtube uploaders  have pushed for, Youtube has finally increased its maximum upload limit time for videos from 10 minutes to 15 minutes. The announcement was made on their blog. It had always been the case that Youtube videos were contained to 10 minutes per video to help control copyright infringement among other things.

So why now you may ask?

“In the meantime, you may wonder “why now?” — the upload limit for non-partners has been 10 minutes for years. Well, we’ve spent significant resources on creating and improving our state-of-the-art Content ID system and many other powerful tools for copyright owners. Now, all of the major U.S. movie studios, music labels and over 1,000 other global partners use Content ID to manage their content on YouTube. Because of the success of these ongoing technological efforts, we are able to increase the upload limit today.”

More.

HTC Evo 4G Gets Froyo August 3rd

Sprint has officially announced through their blog that their best smart phone, the EVO 4G, will be getting the Android 2.2/Froyo update August 3rd. Something as heavily anticipated as this by EVO owners should help put a smile on their faces.

Full post.

New Kindle Coming August 27th

A new, sleeker, and better version of Amazon’s Kindle eReaders is coming out on the 27th of August. For a great $139 price tag, people without an eReader, or were thinking about switching to a Kindle might want to make the jump. The slimmer and lighter model will come in white and graphite colors and have WiFi and 3G options. The contrast on the screen is better to improve its already great reading performance, it has 4GB of total memory, twice as much as its predecessor, and will be a great upgrade to earlier models.