Benjamin Bloodworth's Blog

Yesterday I received an invite on Facebook from two friends to join their cause to “Remove Violators and Paedophiles From Facebook.” I’m sure this sounds like a great idea to most anyone. Unfortunately, it’s more or less unenforceable.

People Lie

Facebook has no real verification system. The only information they can match up to existing databases of criminals is whatever is provided in the sign up form. You can put whatever information you want into the sign up form. It doesn’t have to be your information. Even if you’re a dumb criminal and put your real information into the form and get banned from Facebook, you could easily create another account under a fictitious name.

There are some states that require sex offenders to register their email addresses. Unless those states are constantly monitoring the criminal’s internet communications, there’s no way to tell that they signed up for an email address at any of the thousands of free email services. Even if they did monitor their home Internet connection, the criminal could always go to an Internet Cafe to create an account.

There’s no good way to stop criminals from registering on Facebook. How does a parent protect their children from online predators?

Protecting Yourself and Your Children

There’ve been numerous guidelines and television segments dedicated to monitoring your child’s Internet activity. I won’t bother repeating those suggestions. These segments all leave out a very important part of your child’s security, the parent’s Internet activity.

Social networks, such as Facebook, are great for sharing photos. Parents like to post pictures of their children. It’s common for parents to post a picture of their children, instead of a picture of themselves, for their public profile picture.

I’m not against posting pictures of your children for your family and friends to see, but making those pictures publicly available advertises to online predators that you have children in your home. Not only have you told them that you have children in your home, you’ve given them a picture of your child.

I know you’re thinking that there’s not much they can do with just a picture. That depends on the photo. If it’s a photo of them in their little league costume, the criminal could show up at one of their games and follow you home to find out where you live. They could then return when you aren’t home to protect your child.

Restrict the Information You Provide Online

It’s amazing how much information people put online about themselves. You can click the info tab on someone’s Facebook profile and find out the city they live in, where they work, their email address, their date of birth, and their phone number.

Facebook does provide a lot of good tools to secure your information. Here’s the basics you need to follow, especially, as a parent.

Make Photos of Your Children Private

Whenever you post pictures of your children, create a new album. Set the privacy for this album to Only Friends. Now only your friends can see your photos, instead of everyone on Facebook.

If you didn’t set the privacy the first time you created the album, you can easily change the settings for all of your albums. Click the Album Privacy link, which is accessible from the Photos tab on your profile.

Now set the privacy to Only Friends for each album with photos of your children and click the Save Settings button at the bottom.

Make Your Contact Information Private

You’ve hidden your photos. Now you need to hide your contact information. Follow these steps.

1. From the Settings drop down menu, select Privacy Settings.
   

   Facebook Privacy Settings Menu

2. Click Profile
   

   Facebook Profile Privacy Link

3. Click the Contact Information tab.
   

   Facebook Contact Information Privacy Tab

4. For all information you want to hide from strangers, which in my opinion is everything on this page, select Only Friends from the drop down menu.
5. Click the Save Changes button.

Undermining Your Own Privacy

Now only your friends can see photos of your children and your contact information. Do you personally know all of your Facebook friends? There are a lot of games and other applications on Facebook. Most of these games are easier to play if you have more friends, however not all of your friends want to play these games. A common work around is to invite strangers, who also like to play the game, to be your friend.

By inviting these strangers to be your friend, you’ve just circumvented the security precautions you took to make sure strangers can’t see photos of your children. They are your friends, so the setting “Only Friends” allows them to see the photos. What’s even worse is the amount of information visible on your Info tab.

Now that the stranger sees you have children, they can click over to your info tab and see where you work, the town you live in, your email address, your phone number, your date of birth, and any other information you’ve chosen to provide. They could use any of the information on this page to find out where you and your children live, or use it for other nefarious purposes, such as identity theft. Fortunately, there is a work around.

The most obvious solution is to not provide any of that information, but that defeats the purpose of a social network. It’s nice to share that information with people you know. The way to protect yourself and your children from strangers you’ve invited to be your friends is to create lists.

Use Lists

From your Facebook home page, click the +Create link.

As you can see from the above screen shot, I’ve created two lists. One for people I actually know, and one for hiding my contact information. The people on Facebook that I’ve invited to be friends just so I could use specific applications, go on the Hide Contact Info list. People I know in real life go on the People I Know List. This allows me to restrict personal information from those “Facebook friends” I added just to play some games. I’ll outline the steps below.

Create A List for People You Trust

1. Click the +Create link from your Home screen.
2. Type a name for the list in the box where it has highlighted Enter a Name. I named this list People I Know. Feel free to make up your own name that makes more sense to you. This will be the list for people you trust with your contact information and photos.
3. Now either click the photo of each person you trust, or type their name in the search box. If you accidentally click the wrong person, click their photo again to remove them from the list.
4. After you’ve added everyone who belongs on the list, click the Create List button.

Here’s a screen shot for reference. I’ve intentionally blurred out the photos and names of my friends for their own protection.

Create a List for People You Don’t Trust

Repeat the same steps outlined for Create A List for People You Trust, except give this list a different name. I named this list Hide Contact Info.

Hide Your Contact Info

1. From the Settings drop down menu, select Privacy Settings.
   

   Facebook Privacy Settings Menu

2. Click Profile
   

   Facebook Profile Privacy Link

3. Click the Contact Information tab.
   

   Facebook Contact Information Privacy Tab

4. For all information you want to hide from strangers, which in my opinion is everything on this page, select Customize… from the drop down menu.
   

   Facebook Instant Messaging Privacy

5. Perform the following steps for the dialog box that appears.
   1. Under the Friends section, select Only Friends.
   2. From the Networks drop down menu, select None of My Networks.
   3. Under the Except These People section, type the name of the list you created for people you don’t trust. The name of my list was Hide Contact Info.
   4. Your settings should look similar to this image.
      

      Facebook IM Privacy Settings

   5. Click the Okay button.

By doing this, you are allowing the people you trust to see your contact information, but hiding it from people you don’t trust. You can test the settings by typing the name of a friend you don’t trust into the See how a friend sees your profile: text box.

Hide Your Albums

Go back to the privacy settings for your photo albums. See the Make Photos of Your Children Private section above and follow these steps. These steps are mostly the same as what you did for hiding your contact information.

1. Select Customize… from the drop down menu.
2. Uncheck Everyone on Facebook.
3. Select Only Friends.
4. Select None of My Networks from the Networks drop down menu.
5. Type the name of the list you created for people you don’t trust in the Except These People text box.
6. Click the Okay button.

Add Friends to Lists During Invites

Now you’ve hidden your personal information from strangers on Facebook. You will need to remember to add people to your lists whenever you accept or send friend invitations. Fortunately this is easy. Choose the appropriate list from the Add to list… drop down menu.

By following these steps, you can protect your own identity and your children on Facebook. An added benefit to creating lists is that you can also filter the News Feed down to just the people you are interested in by clicking the list from your Home screen.