How to check all of your Facebook Privacy settings at once

by on May 18, 2010

The folks over at ReclaimPrivacy.org have created a fantastic tool that will quickly scan all of your Facebook Privacy settings, and report back to you any “weaknesses” it finds. It’s simple to use, and provides links to each privacy setting that it determines as ‘weak’ so that you can make the change right away.

  1. The “tool” itself is a bookmarklet and completely open source. That means that anyone can view the code the script is made up of – so it is absolutely safe to use. It also happens to be very easy to install. Simply visit ReclaimPrivacy.org. On that page, click the Scan for Privacy link and hold down your mouse button. While holding the button down, drag it to your browsers Bookmarks Bar and let go of the mouse button.


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  2. Make sure that you now have a Scan for Privacy book in your Bookmarks Bar.


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  3. Now visit Facebook and sign in. Once you’re signed in, click the Scan for Privacy bookmark button.


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  4. The script will now scan through all of your Facebook Privacy settings, and return the results in a frame above your Facebook page (see the screenshot below). If it returns any results with a caution setting – you’ll want to review it carefully. As seen in the image below, my Facebook account had two privacy issues – some of my contact information was exposed to the entire Internet, and some of my friends, tags and connections were also visible to the Internet as well. Click the link provided in each section to adjust its privacy settings. Again, as an example, to fix my contact information not being displayed to the Internet, I clicked the contact settings link.


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  5. Sure enough, some of my contact info was set to visible to the entire world.


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  6. So I changed everything to Only Friends.


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  7. Repeat the same process (click the link provided in any section labeled caution) and re-run the scan until everything comes up green (good). If you run the scan again and it seems to “stall”, sign out of Facebook and then back in – then click the Scan for Privacy button/bookmarklet.


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  8. That’s it – you’re done! You can make sure you’re up to date on this info and much more like it by joining my Simple Help Facebook Page