The new Facebook news ticker was launched recently. With the help of a friend, I spent the night after they rolled it out testing out the lack of privacy on the new feature.
What you can see on your news ticker is easy to control (albeit a bit time consuming) by selecting what you subscribe to on your friends’ profiles. You probably particularly you want to disable “comments and likes”. I’ve found I have to keep doing this regularly as Facebook “forget”, so creating lists is probably a better way to manage friends.
Of course, you might feel that we shouldn’t have to rely on our friends unsubscribing from our actions in order to control what they see about us, but at the minute we do. The slightly more worrying thing is that the news ticker shows to others comments you make on your friends’ pictures and posts, regardless of whether they are friends with that person or not. The reverse of this is also true, so it is now possible for our comments and posts and pictures to be available to unintended recipients.
Facebook would argue that this has always been possible through the recent activity link on your profile, but that was at least buried away on your profile page and not publishing itself to the world. There are a couple of things you can do to lessen the amount of information that is shared. For example, if someone cannot normally view your pictures or wall posts, they won’t get the message on their news ticker, but this means our privacy settings need to be heavily restricted!
Facecrooks also has some good info on hiding your recent activity, although it’s not been tested to see if it affects the news ticker . Lastly, and sadly, we’re left to rely on the security settings of third parties. If we comment on a profile that is not sufficiently locked down, then all your friends will potentially be informed of your comment.
This could be particularly embarrassing given the mix of work colleagues, friends, parents and others on one’s friends list. Since I looked into this, Sophos have posted a good article on the importance of privacy settings.