The new Facebook Ticker box on the right is an abomination unto privacy, but it is designed to only show you items you could always see on other people’s pages. So if I wrote on Random Friend from Uni’s wall, my Random Friend from School in 1987 could still see it if my uni friend has the ‘friend of friends’ or ‘everyone’ access to the wall privacy setting in place. Or has an open profile. What the Tickerbox does though is bring it right up in my “random friend from school”‘s face without having to browse my wall or all of my friends’ walls. And so it does a great service: “Privacy? Facebook cares not”.
Hmm – this seems to be a current issue (surprise, surprise).
It seems to me (I haven’t been able to test it fully) that the ticker box shows you material you could always see, but only if you clicked through to the friend of a friend’s wall. I believe Zuckerberg calls this ‘frictionless’; I call it invasive. Having said that there was a report I saw saying there was a bug with the Ticker that it did show one person material that they shouldn’t have been able to see (http://facebookprivacyandsecurity.wordpress.com/).
Just to be clear, I don’t have an answer as to how to cure the issue. You can control your own wall, of course, and all good FB citizens should probably limit access to who can see ‘wall posts’ on their wall to ‘friends only’ to curb the ticker-box frenzy.
That means click on the down-arrow next to ‘Home’ on Facebook, choose ‘Privacy Settings’, and ‘Edit Settings’ for ‘How you Connect’. Then change the setting for ‘Who can see Wall posts by others on your profile?’ to ‘Friends’ rather than ‘Friends of Friends’. Or better yet, limit it to access to a particular custom group of friends, if that’s how you roll with your privacy on Facebook.
Not ALL of my FB friends get to see ALL of my FB content.
Thanks: Micheal Axelsen