Facebook

[chewchoo]

one other thing about facebook - it reflects your personality.

if you are outgoing and have to be the center of attention, then your facebook page/activity will be likewise.

if you fly under the radar in the real world, you’ll be able to fly under the radar on facebook, unless of course you want to let loose.

as for other people tagging you, that is true, but i have yet to be tagged.

 

[Joe_5859]

Just never post anything you wouldn’t want your boss or your mother to see, and that isn’t already general knowledge among your friends, anyway.

Even with privacy turned on, friends of your friends can still see your photo albums, so don’t put anything in them that could potentially embarrass yourself or anyone else. And never be photographed or video-taped doing anything you wouldn’t want the whole world to see, because you don’t know if the photographer/videographer is going to “tag” you and post it on his own Facebook page.

“Tags” get linked back to your page, and anyone clicking on your page can see not only your own photo albums and videos, but anyone else’s photo albums and videos that you’ve been tagged in.

You can set it so that only friends can see your pictures as well. That’s what I did. I’m not sure how that works if someone else tags you in one of their pictures, though. So far, no one has posted anything of me that is exceptionally embarassing. Hopefully, those pictures don’t exist!

 

[yellowbicycle]

Pay very close attention to the e-mails which tell you that so and so has tagged you in a photo. There have been times where I had to be like, uh no, and remove the tag and therefore remove the picture from my facebook.

Unfortunately, any pictures your friends take of you, posted, and labeled, are by default added to your pictures on your facebook page. It is up to you to be attentive and remove these tags. Then as other have mentioned, make sure your profile page is set to private and set so only your friends can see it.

I just want to piggyback on this statement. You can change your privacy settings so that pictures in which you are tagged are NOT viewable through your own facebook page.
Like this:
Your friend John takes a picture of you and him.
He posts it on his facebook page and tags you in the photo.
If someone goes to JOhn’s page, they will see this picture. If someone goes to YOUR page, they will see this picture, UNLESS you change your privacy settings to prevent tagged pictures of you being seen. Unfortunately, the pic is still available on your friend’s page, but if somsone looked at your page, they woudln’t see that picture.
Also, for my facebook page, I use a fake name, and my profile pic is David Hasselhoff. When I send friend requests, I also send the person a message, telling them what my real name is. If an employer scanned facebook for my name, they’d never find it

 

[jmcrae]

Lucky for me, my name is so dirt common, that googling my name yields hundreds of thousands of results (and that’s with my name in quotation marks). I pity the poor HR person trying to find stuff about me online.

The other people who share my name, that come up on Google, have really impressive resumes.

 

[didymus]

Facebook almost got me killed Friday.
It has all these cute gizmos that let you send your friends a flower or a lollipop, or take a quiz to find out what color you are blahblah. I never do any of this stuff because the first time my wife sent me a flower and I clicked on it a window came up that said the application would pull up my profile and all my friends’ profiles so I canceled.
I don’t do ANY of these quizzes of other applications.

Meanwhile one of DW’s friends takes the Facebook and sends it to her but she gets a message that says “Tom thinks you’re an idiot, take the Facebook IQ Test.”

You ever see cartoons where somebody’s face turns red like mercury rising in a thermometer – then steam shoots out their ears?
That’s DW when she read that message. It took five minutes to convince her that I was innocent but she still had some mad left.

I think I’ll cancel my account.

 

[stringbeanduck]

Hey man you just got to ignore that stuff. I get that all the time where it will say one of my friends thinks I’m dumb, cute, ugly, smart, funny, sexy, ect. Heck it will even try to pair me up with girls over 18 who are looking for “fun” or at least try to get to look at their photos. All just because I’m single. Fortunately I’m immune to that sin and temptation. Part of it is spam, the other part is harmless games and such that waste your time so you look at the adds. FB got to make their money somehow. I will say some of games, albeit a waste of time are kind of fun. Like the pick 5 guys who you would want to back you up in a bar fight. lol. That was funny.

 

[sharonshay]

I guess I am a little different than most of the posters here. While I do have some privacy settings set, and I am careful, I don’t feel the need to be as careful as others have suggested. I don’t have any facebook “issues.” I’ve had no problems whatsoever, and have met some truly wonderful people. It can be a lot of fun, a great place to network, and a great way to meet like-minded people.

 

[jmcrae]

Facebook almost got me killed Friday.
It has all these cute gizmos that let you send your friends a flower or a lollipop, or take a quiz to find out what color you are blahblah. I never do any of this stuff because the first time my wife sent me a flower and I clicked on it a window came up that said the application would pull up my profile and all my friends’ profiles so I canceled.
I don’t do ANY of these quizzes of other applications.

Meanwhile one of DW’s friends takes the Facebook and sends it to her but she gets a message that says “Tom thinks you’re an idiot, take the Facebook IQ Test.”

You ever see cartoons where somebody’s face turns red like mercury rising in a thermometer – then steam shoots out their ears?
That’s DW when she read that message. It took five minutes to convince her that I was innocent but she still had some mad left.

I think I’ll cancel my account.

They really need to add a caveat that it’s just a machine-generated message that picks a name at random from among your friends. That’s not as bad as it gets, though - I got a message from it, telling me that my parish priest is madly in love with me.

He hasn’t spoken to me in over a month. I don’t know if it’s out of embarrassment for that, or if the machine said something about me, to him.

 

[didymus]

They really need to add a caveat that it’s just a machine-generated message that picks a name at random from among your friends. That’s not as bad as it gets, though - I got a message from it, telling me that my parish priest is madly in love with me.

He hasn’t spoken to me in over a month. I don’t know if it’s out of embarrassment for that, or if the machine said something about me, to him.

That’s horrible!
I’m glad it didn’t generate a message, “Tom is madly in love with ----”

No more Facebook for me. I found it interesting that when I went to the Help section “How do I permanently delete my account?” was the second most frequently asked question.

 

[Joe_5859]

Under the privacy settings, you can also limit exactly what information those applications are allowed to pull from your account. I think you can only do that after you’ve already opened the application, though.

It took me a while to realize, but all those goofy messages such as “3 friends have a crush on you, 1 thinks you’re an idiot…click here to find out who” are really just advertisements. It does not in anyway mean any of your friends actually said that or “challenged” you to anything. They’re just trying to goad people into clicking on it. I think it’s a bit annoying as it’s not distinguishable enough from the rest of the page for someone to recognize immediately that it’s an advertisement and not a Facebook update. But there you go.

I have enjoyed my time there. I’m not that concerned if a bunch of people that I’ve know from the course of my life know who my favorite music groups are or see pictures of me and my family. But I haven’t received friend requests from people I don’t know.

 

[AdvanceAlways]

We are in a bit of a “Facebook crisis” in our home with our teenaged daughter. Our children are not permitted to use social networking sites because (1) as parents, we don’t have time to spend policing their privacy settings and postings (nor do we choose to spend our scant free time doing so); (2) the downside risk appears TREMENDOUS, particularly for girls who can easily be targeted by online predators; (3) these sites are huge timewasters; and (4) they strike us as creepily narcissistic. All that said, our daughter is now being subtly ostracized by her so-called friends because she’s not on Facebook, and that’s where they set up all of their social activities – parties, movie dates, etc. Naturally, we’re the bad guys, and she can’t understand why we won’t give in. We could use some advice, commiseration, prayers…

I could see this being an issue with MySpace but these concerns are not much of an issue with facebook. The downsides are only tremendous if you put yourself in a situation for it to be tremendous. If you play safe, then you won’t run into any problems with facebook.

They are only timewasters if you let them get in the way of studies, etc. They are actually quite useful. I’ve reconnected with old friends and even connected with different vocations directors for the religious orders I am discerning with.

I will say that I, being a teenager, sympathize with your daughter. Facebook is one of the main tools for social communication and not having one can result in being left out of stuff. If someone has a party or team meeting or something, the quickest way to do it is on facebook. Its organized and right there. As long as your daughter is safe with it, it probably won’t do any harm. And please do not think I’m judging you or your daughter or anything like that, but if teens want to get on to a social networking site, they will find a way regardless of their parents wishes.

 

[chewchoo]

. But I haven’t received friend requests from people I don’t know.

i have. twice. one because of a game i was playing and the other, i have no idea. maybe it was becasue of my network.