How to regain a bit of privacy on Facebook

Facebook has been in the news a lot lately, not for what they did directly, but for what they allowed Cambridge Analytica to do…namely, harvest private information of the Facebook friends of people who had opted to take a quiz (and opted to share their info by doing so).  Around fifty million users were affected…and the fine per violation is up to $40,000!  So yeah, it’s kinda a big deal, especially as this data was used for political gain by the Trump campaign, and a good reason why the stock has plummeted (potential trillion dollar fine, not to mention loss of users and trust).

Many people are quitting Facebook as a result, as they’ve realized what a massive amount of data has been compiled on them.  Their likes, travel, interests, their whole life is sometimes documented on Facebook for companies to profit from.  There’s another option though…delete your history.  Facebook is a fun way to keep in touch with friends, but do you really need an archive of what you posted several years ago?

To delete old posts, likes, and other activity, go to the ‘activity log’ of your profile page, then you delete items one by one.  LOL.  I mean yeah, you CAN do it, but if you’re a heavy user, that’s crazy!  Naturally, technology provides us with a better option. 🙂 Install Google Chrome, then install the ‘Social Book Post Manager’ extension.  This will allow you to perform actions on a bulk level…either delete, or hide, based on year/month or even keywords (painful relationship history?  Erase all mention of your ex from your life! 🙂 ).  You can choose how far back to maintain your data…and use FB as a ‘current events’ record instead!

I’ll admit it though…deleting old posts was scary!  The extension does give you a preview of what it’s going to delete, but you’re looking for tiny checkmarks, it’s not a great user interface as the extension has to work with with Facebook provides for this.  Then when you do have a chance to confirm, there was a ‘select all’ option (avoid that and choose ‘confirm’ instead!), and the Facebook UI threw up various confirmation windows that you need to ignore until the extension is done, then hit cancel on those windows that won’t go away.  So, clunky approach…but it DOES give you a tool to regain a bit of privacy on Facebook without abandoning it entirely.

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