04.02.13

Facebook is a free user friendly interactive blog that many individuals use as their online journal to share their life events with friends and family. Likewise, many businesses, organizations, and artisans use a Facebook page as their website blog. The key to navigating Facebook is to know the rules of road and to understand that getting around in Facebook is much like driving around in a new town that you just moved to. You know that when driving in a new town you may want a map to be sure that you know where you are going and a local friend to tell you what neighborhoods to stay out of. In that new town you know where your house is by your address, on Facebook your page has an address on the internet so that you and others can find it. On a real house you have locks on the doors and windows so you feel relatively safe in your house with your doors and windows locked. Your Facebook page has a security system that acts as locks on the doors and windows. If you trust specific family and friends, you may give them a key to your house, thereby granting them permission to come in and look around when you are gone, but you don’t give them all the keys to the locked cabinets in the house where you may keep your photo albums, notes, journals and other private information. If you want these special friends to see your photo albums, notes or journals then you may leave those albums out for them to see. You may also post a note for your friends to read on your bulletin board on your wall, and they may write a comment back to you. They may also sharethat information with their friends. In the real world we may post an address with instructions for our friend to go to another address to see something interesting. We wouldn’t knowingly send our friend to a bad neighborhood where they could be hurt, but on the internet sharing unverified information could lead to that reality. On your Facebook page you accept a friend and give them access to your timeline area, and they can read notes you wrote on your timeline wall as well as share that information with their friends. I think of the Timeline wall as a private online interactive bulletin board. On your Facebook page your friends can also look at the photo albums if you have granted them permission to see those specific photo albums, and they may even be able to post comments or pictures if you have set your security to allow that friend to carry out that specific activity. In a real town when you leave your house you follow the rules of the road, and you realize that you are no longer inside the security of your home, but on Facebook it can be hard to tell where you are sometimes until you get used to it. What’s different about driving around in Facebook is that your driver’s seat is the chair behind your computer, and your windshield is your computer screen, but in this virtual town you may be on a road by the click of your mouse that brings you into a public area called HOME page, also known as your newsfeed, where you may write a comment on a post not realizing that you are actually in a public area. To compare this area to the real world, think of it as the community room bulletin board where all your friends’ posts, which they wrote on their timeline, magically appear on this community bulletin board. If you comment on their post, then your comments will magically appear on their timeline wall, so in effect you have walked into their house and wrote on the note that they posted on their personal bulletin board. Likewise, you can share their post with the click of your mouse and it will magically appear on your own timeline wall. When you share on Facebook by clicking a mouse you also invite everyone who had permission to see the original message onto your page. You may cut and paste instead, but that is a lesson in itself. There are also private message areas where only you and your friend can see the message, but remember these messages are similar to email, they can be forwarded too. Facebook is much more user friendly now with the timeline features, but just like any social group we join, there are rules and policies that the users should be familiar with. In addition to the written rules, there are also unwritten rules that we should all think about when we share unverified information, it may be inaccurate; then we are guilty of helping spread a rumor. Worse yet, on the internet if the post contains a link to another internet address, then we could be sending our friend to a virtual bad neighborhood where their computer could get a malicious code or virus. I know some people just don’t like to read directions but the Facebook Help Features are easy to use, help you understand where you are at all times, and is imperative to your cyber security. Here are a couple links to get you started and if you need help, drop me an email, I will be glad to help in any way that I can. Remember, once you write something anywhere on the internet, it can take on a life of its own, and you may not be able to take it back, so for cyber security sake, think and verify before you post or share.

Security help https://www.facebook.com/help/privacy

Filtering Friends https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=190416214359937&in_context

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