Online Lockdown
You may or may not be aware of it, but your personal practices and a great deal of your personal information are easily discoverable depending upon how much care you take in your day to day life to protect it. The following section will list best practices to take (the real) you off of the grid, and ensure that the release of information about everything that’s available out in the open happens if and only if you decide to release it.
Securing Your Online Persona
Secure your Friends List
Your first order of business when securing your digital identity on Facebook is to organize and categorize the types of associations that you have made until now according to their affiliation utilizing the Friends List feature. If you weren’t aware that it was there before, don’t feel any as if you’re alone. Almost no one we’ve trained so far has bothered to incorporate changes since the feature has been introduced to the site’s functionality.
As Facebook describes the feature:
“Friend Lists provide organized groupings of your friends on Facebook. For example, you can create a Friend List for your friends that meet for weekly book club meetings. You can filter your view of each list’s stream of activity separately on the home page. Friend Lists are easy to manage and allow you to send messages and invites to these groups of people all at once.”
There are a two things that are key to understand about this feature:
You can add each friend to more than one Friend List
Friend Lists can have specific privacy policies applied to them
The recommended classifications are as follows:
- Friends
- Operatives
- Marks
- Targets
- Family
- Professional
Let’s reflect on the developer’s direction:
“Your friends’ privacy settings will always default to the most restrictive friend list they’ve been placed in.”
For instance: If your boss has ignored proper decency and forced you awkwardly into accepting a friend request and and you run into him from time to time while you’re out, you may have originally placed him into the Professional Category. Suddenly, one night, you’re forced into a position where an unexpected photo is snapped right after you run into him.
There’s a great chance he’s planning on throwing it up on FB to show what great buddies you are. Can’t exactly have him see you shutting down a black tie reception on the night before you “caught a stomach bug”. If you’ve configured your Friends List feature properly and your Professional list cannot see photos you’ve been tagged in by Targets or Friends you’re in the clear.
The process is lengthy and tedious depending upon how many friends are on your original list, but it’s well worth it for the hassle-free security of knowing that you won’t be compromised by a new acquaintance who doesn’t know any better.
Visit your Friends section and put in the time before reading further.
Disappear From Facebook Search Results
As we’ve already said, facebook is one of the first stops when someone is trying to vet you in the field via smartphone. With the new privacy settings page installed by the developer, it’s extremely easy to have your profile page removed from the algorythms in the internal search engine.
Go to your privacy settings – Edit Settings – Enter Password – Next to Facebook Search Results – Only Friends
Disappear from Google
Google’s search results drive up the amount of traffic facebook gets from the general public by allowing limited access to profiles to appear in the public search engine. As most people have found out, you can often gather a cursory amount of information from the profile that appears in the search results even without being a friend.
To remove your limited profile from the google search results, go to the search privacy settings page and untoggle the Public Search Results. You may still be available for a few hours to a few days in the public search results as the search engines remove your information from the public cache, but it will happen eventually.
Take a Hard Look At the Photos You Have Already Posted
With so many organizations now vetting new candidates for positions via social media, and so many organizations actively surveilling their employees to protect image, one slip up could cost you a great deal… even if you’re not the one tagging yourself in the photo or video.
Time to head back over to the Privacy Settings Page and visit the “Photos and Videos of Me” section. From the drop-down menu click the option labeled Custom. Next select “only me.” From there, align your permissions of certain photos and albums to the networks as appropriate.
Next, we turn to your photos privacy setting page.
At the very least, you need to make sure that your settings are limited to Friends Only. The rest can be done at your discretion. It bears saying, though, that its worth drilling through ALL of your albums and photos before making decisions.
Stop Broadcasting Your Relationship Status To The World
The world does not need to know the inner workings of your romantic life. Chances are, it’s going to get a whole lot dicier now that you’ve volunteered for this little adventure.
Simply return to your profile privacy settings page and change your family and relationship status to “only me.”
Make Your Legitimate Contact Information Private
As you’ll see later when we walk you through creating your fieldcraft-purposed profile, there is a select few who should be able to use facebook to recall your phone number or email contact information, and the times at which they should need to resort to facebook are few.
Go to the contact privacy settings page and customize your access accordingly.
If you have trouble getting there you can make the same modifications directly on your profile page when you edit the section.
Stop Letting Imbeciles Graffiti On Your Wall
Chances are, you’ve probably already deleted more than a few inappropriate posts that have appeared on your wall. Stopping everyone on your lists from posting at all is counter to our purposes here, as you’ll see later on.
For now, go to the small blue options text (next to the magnifying glass icon) under the share button where you normally change your own status and then settings. Customize the “Who can view wall posts made by friends?” in accord with the principles we used in the last few sections.
Stop Broadcasting Your Known Associates
The appeal of facebook and the feature that has enabled its viral spread is the ability that it gives people to see how they’re associated. For our fieldwork profile, this will be to our advantage. For now, however, we need to secure our friends list from the universe of facebook to prevent any electronic counter-surveillance.
To accomplish this go to your profile page, click on the icon in “Friends” box and uncheck the box that says “Show my friends on my profile.”
Stop Checking In And Stay Checked Out
Again, as you’ll see in future sections, when we create our new online identity for engaging in fieldcraft, we’ll be using more and more open systems to edit and control the release of personal information to our own ends. For now, however, it’s rather important to check into a single safe place and let your facebook places functionality slowly brown and then black out.
To accomplish this, return to your privacy settings, click the customize option again (if it isn’t already selected) and then click the customize settings link we visited before. Under the Things I Share section there are two things we need to change. Set this option to Only Me. Below that option is “Include me in ‘People Here Now’ after I check in.” It is enabled by default.
Since we won’t be checking in anywhere, that’s a good situational awareness tool to allow enabled.
The last, and most critically important feature to disable in this section is to ensure that your friends cannot check you into Places against your will. In essence, while they’re blindly playing with their unsecure toy, they’re exposing your current location to an unauthorized group of people.
From here, go down to the section called Things Others Share and find Friends can check me in to Places. Change this option to Disabled.
Foursquare Follies
The general trend in most mobile applications designed to market social products and services drive their revenues by socially flavoring the check-in process by adding a virtual social status to the frequency with which you frequent the venue.
(Foursquare will make you “mayor” of a location if you’re there more than all other mobile users.)
Taking part in this cultural game may be entertaining, but can be utilized by the opposition to map out locations where you hold high status and get a sense of your daily pattern. There is a safeguard preventing people other than your friend from seeing where you are at any given time, but anyone who can figure out your Foursquare username can pull up your profile page and have access to a record of the greatest places to run into you. (Say, your local gym.)
With applications like Twitter and Facebook offering more and more incentive for users to connect to applications like Foursquare, the functionality is becoming more and more interconnected. Great for markets and marketers, but horrible for security. Should you choose to check in to a particular location, you (and everyone else) is immediately granted access to the Who’s Here list.
This list also immediately sees your profile, know who you’re normally there with, etc.
If that weren’t enough, this messy web of breached security gets even more tangled.
Follow this scenario:
- Debbie Downer checks in on her Foursquare account at your favorite venue and has her account linked to Twitter. “Out for Appletinis with the girls at Public” instantly shows up as another mindless datapoint to everyone on her Twitter feed.
- In the event that I actually have some interest in Debbie Downer and I hazard a visit (and check in) to Public for happy hour and have happily gone on my way, but just haven’t checked in anywhere else yet clearing my history. “I am at Starbucks in Dupont w/@operativeX” shows up in Debbie’s tweets. This is inevitable, even if I haven’t linked my account to autoforward to Twitter.
The problem here is twofold. First, Debbie has just announced my location to everyone else on her Twitter feed, now allowing them to aggregate more data about my whereabouts. And second, it communicates to everyone on her Twitter feed that I am spending more time out with Debbie, when in reality, I never subjected myself to Appletinis with the girls.
Avoid Foursquare… for now.
