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A Renegade Inc. guide to Facebook privacy

In light of the recent Cambridge Analytica revelations, we thought it important to show Facebook users how to reclaim some of their internet privacy

Please understand that both Google and Facebook can track your activity and location whether you like it or not, whether you have an account, or not. But with this guide, you will at least be able to control what access Facebook and its advertisers have to your data.

 

Apps

Mobile Tap on the ‘hamburger button’ (three parallel lines stacked vertically in the top right corner of your screen),  which will open a slider menu, scroll down, tap Privacy Shortcuts, scroll down and tap ‘… More Settings’, tap ‘Logged in with Facebook’ to find out which apps currently have access to your profile. Tap on each app to discover and control what information you are providing. This can include your friend list, timeline posts, public profile, email address and whether that app can post on your behalf. Click on each category to add or remove what information it has access to. Scroll down and hit ‘Remove app’ to delete it from your Facebook.

Desktop Click on the upside-down arrow in the top right corner of your screen and hit ‘Settings’, click on ‘Privacy’ in the left-hand column, click ‘Apps’ in the left-hand column, the App settings page will show you all the apps you have logged into using Facebook and allow you to edit or remove them from your Facebook. To delete, hover your cursor over each app and click the little ‘x’ button on the right hand side. Or click the pencil icon to edit. Once you’ve hit ‘edit’, a screen will appear revealing what information the app currently has access to. Edit its level of access by ticking or unticking your friend list, email address, app visibility, remove information collected by the app.

Mobile & Desktop You can also contact the developers with further questions, (which I recommend doing in any case, because they will continue to hold whatever data they have already collected about you up until this point, unless you ask them explicitly to delete it, which in any case, they have no obligation to do so). To attempt to get your data deleted you’ll need your user ID which you can find back on the Apps page, and clicking on the app and scrolling down to the bottom of the page.

Apps, websites and plugins

It’s not over yet, folks.

To prevent it from accessing other online portals that use Facebook to login, go back to the Apps page.

Mobile Tap on Platform, and hit ‘edit’ under the Apps and Websites heading, hit ‘Turn off platform’.

Desktop Navigate to Apps page (left hand column), hit ‘edit’ under the Apps Websites and Plugins heading (located underneath the list of apps under the ‘logged in with Facebook’ heading). Click ‘disable platform’. If you have been using Facebook to login to various platforms (email, games, other user platforms), you may need to create a new login for these services.

Apps Others Use

These settings control what of your information your friends might inadvertently be sharing with apps they use.This includes information like your birthday, whether you are on or offline, your family and relationships, your interests, religious and political views, your website, hometown, education, app activity and bio. If you do not want this information to be shared, simply tap on the categories that currently have a tick next to them.

Mobile Navigate to Apps menu (privacy shortcuts -> more settings -> apps), tap ‘Apps others use’.

Desktop Navigate to the apps menu, (settings -> apps), click on the ‘edit’ button under Apps others use’

Custom advertising

If you do not want Facebook displaying ads based off your internet activity, navigate to the settings panel, hit ads, and switch off ‘Ads based on my use of websites and apps’.

Friends

If you have been using Facebook for as long as I have, you’ve probably picked up more than a couple of randoms along the way. There are two ways to control what information they have access to: Facebook’s list functions, and its privacy settings.

Lists

Whenever you add someone as a friend, you can categorise them into various lists. (Close friends, friends, acquaintances etc). To control what of our activity friends can see, navigate to the Facebook profile of the friend in question and click or tap on the ‘Friends’ icon which sits on the left, underneath their profile picture on mobile. Click or tap ‘Edit friend list’, and select what kind of friend you’d like them to be by tapping on the various options, or create a list of your own.

Whenever you create a post, you can then choose who gets to see it by clicking the upside down triangle next to ‘Friends’ and then select the level of privacy you’d like for that post.

Privacy Settings

(This can be controlled more thoroughly on desktop than mobile).

Mobile Navigate to Privacy Shortcuts by scrolling down the left hand column after you select the ‘burger’ icon in the top right hand corner.

You can achieve the same result by navigating to ‘Who can see my stuff’ under Privacy Shortcuts, tap on ‘Who can see your future posts’ and select from your various lists

Control who can contact you by navigating to the ‘Who can contact me’ section and selecting from Everyone to friends-of-friends.

Desktop Select the upside down triangle in the top right hand corner, click ‘Settings’, click ‘Privacy’. From here you can edit ‘Who can send you friend requests,’ ‘Who can see your friends list’, ‘Who can look you up using the email address you provided’, ‘Who can look you up using the phone number you provided’, ‘Do you want search engines outside of Facebook to link to your profile?’.

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