Following a number of worried posts about the new Ticker on facebook, I did a wee bit of research, I’ve distilled it down to this:
If you’re concerned about the whole ‘Ticker shows people the colour of my underwear’ thing, bear this in mind – when you comment or like something on facebook, you do it so your friends can see either how witty you are or how important something is to you; it’s ‘social media’ so you share with your friends. All 600 of them. And the people looking over their shoulders going, “Ooh, who’s that?”
However, some folks have their status updates privacy set to ‘friends of friends’ or even ‘public’ – this is probably a mistake: do you really want the world and the world’s friends to know the intimate details of how your head works?
So three things to do:
1) Ensure your own privacy settings for your updates are set to ‘friends’ or even a sub-group of your friends
2) Remember that tagging someone else in your post or photo means all of their friends can see your update too, not just our own.
3) Before commenting or clicking ‘like’ on (for instance) John’s status, make sure you’ve checked his privacy setting for that post – if it’s not ‘John’s friends’, then send a private message instead.
Does that help? Have I understood the situation correctly?
ps No, facebook isn’t about to start charging, they’re making plenty of money out of the ads.
pps Asking me to stop looking at your comment and likes is kind of telling me to stop stalking you – The only person I know who actually stalks me on facebook is my mum 🙂 If you have ‘friends’ you don’t want to see what you’re up to then unfriend them and use twitter for stuff you’re happy for the world to see.
http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=171783462899295