Facebook Hidden Privacy Setting for Wall Posts by Friends

On April 7, 2010, I mentioned one of the confusing privacy settings Who can see posts made by friends? As of today, the setting was reworded a bit and honors your wish. Unfortunately, this setting is still the gatekeeper which controls who can post to your wall regardless of your specific setting.

If you go into your Privacy Settings | Customize Settings page, scroll down a bit, you will see the similar setting below.

What happens when I change the setting Can see Wall posts by friends to Only Me and leave Friend can post on my Wall unchanged, still enabled?

• Yes, my friends will only see my posts when they visit my wall.
• Unfortunately, their privilege to post to my wall is also taken away. The post box in my wall is no longer available to them.

It looks to me that Can see Wall posts by friends setting takes precedence. Previously, we could not use this to filter wall posts by friends. Now Facebook fixed it but it doesn't fix the wall post control. This setting still controls who can post to your wall.

If you play games at Facebook and rely on your friend Wall-to-Wall posts, be sure to set appropriate setting to this seting, Can see Wall posts by friends. Otherwise, no one can post to your wall but yourself.

Facebook Privacy Setting for Wall Posts by Friends

Also see the update on Jan 5, 2011.

Facebook has been changing a lot since this March and they still keep changing. Have you ever noticed the above setting in the red box?

You can find this setting at your personal profile page. Go to your profile, locate the "Share" button. Right below it, click on "Settings," you will find the above settings circling by the red box.

If you change the setting for "Who can see posts made by friends?" to "Only Me," the check box for "Posting Ability" will be grayed out and become unchecked. It means no one or application can post anything to your wall. Unfortunately you won't notice this change unless you immediately refresh the page and then go back to the same location to check on it. Or you may know this problem when someone notifies you.

These above two settings are supposedly corresponding to the settings at your privacy settings page. Again, it is confusing. After the changes made from your profile page, if you go and check your privacy settings page, you will find this confusing settings as shown in the following picture.

The check box for "Friends can post on my Wall" is still on (checked) while "Posts by Friends - Control who can see posts by your friends on your profile" is set to "Only Me."

Because the second setting is set to "Only Me," no one but you can post to your wall. Thus, if you allow your friends to post something to your wall, please make sure "... [W|w]ho can see posts made by ... friends... " is set appropriate in your profile page or your privacy settings page.

I personally don't understand why Facebook still doesn't want to change or amend this wording "... who can see posts made by ... friends?" to make things clear.

Your Facebook photo alumn is never private

Regardless of your permission setting on your Facebook photo albums, they are all considered public. Each album is assigned an unique access link. It can be found at the bottom of the album page (the link is only visible to you). Don't think you set the photos are only viewed by you; then the rest of the world can't see it. Facebook has explicitly said in every album that "Share this album with anyone by sending them this public link: ...." Obviously your photos are viewable to non-facebook users, which means everyone. The link will look like this:

    http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=12345&id=123456789&l=abcdefghij

In the above example, l=abcdefghij, I believe, is sort of the public access ID. Without it, non-Facebook users cannot go in the album or see the photo. Therefore, don't casually distribute your album link to anyone. Without it, the link is difficult for human educated guess; possibly a hack program can. If you have ever published the link to someone else, you may consider to create a new album by transferring the existing photos to the new one and then delete the old album. The new album will be assigned a new public access ID. Such a way it may keep your photos more safer. As of this writing, there is still no guarantee to keep your photo on Facebook 100% private.

How to make your Facebook note visible to everyone?

[Update on Oct 1, 2010]

Facebook has changed a lot since March 2010. This post previously is no longer valid. In the past, Facebook Notes privacy setting possessed its own rules and settings which were different from other applications. Nowadays everything has been migrated. Notes acts like other applications and its privacy permission setting also follows the norms.

There are 4 categories in permissions: Everyone, Friends of Friends, Friends Only and Customize. The privacy permission is a lot of simpler. For example,

Setting permission to Everyone on a note means that this note is visible to everyone on Facebook, no matter if your wall is closed or the wall is visible only to yourself. However, if your personal profile is closed or only visible to certain people, the Facebook community may not see your note via your profile page unless they have your note URL, e.g. http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=[your_note_id].

Unlike the past, the default setting of Notes application has no additional control on permissions. It will be applied to a note when published only when you don't make any permission change individually.

There are two areas to control if your Facebook note is visible to everyone.

First, you have to open your application permission door to the Facebook public. This application permission acts like a gatekeeper to control who can get in the Notes door and see your notes. The default permission is Everyone. Each individual note can be associated or applied by different permissions as needed. The default is still Everyone. If you set your Notes application permission to something else other than Everyone, and then you set your individual note to Everyone, your note will not be visible to everyone on Facebook. For example, if you set the Notes application permission to Only Friends, and you set your note to Everyone, it means that only everyone of your friends will see that note. In other words, the permissions for both the application and the note itself must be set to Everyone in order to share that note with the Facebook public. The following table could provides you some illustration.

Notes Application Permission	Individual Note Permission	Who can see the note
Everyone	Everyone	Everyone on the Facebook this is the default.
Only Friends	Everyone	Everyone of your friends on Facebook

All combination permission sets are not shown in this table. There are only two examples as discussed.

For me, I set my Notes application permission to Everyone; then I use the individual note permission to control who can see my notes. Some notes will be shared with the entire Facebook community, some with my friends, some with certain people and some even only for myself. If you are sure that you won't share anything to the Facebook public, you can just simply to close the door by setting the application permission to something else other than Everyone. Then the unwanted guests won't be able to get into your Notes territory.

How and where to set the application permission settings

Here is one of the ways to do it.

• Navigate to your Notes page, and then at the top of the page (blue bar), mouse over Settings. you will see something similar as below.
  
• Select Notes Settings if it exists; otherwise, select Application Settings.
• If you select Application Settings, locate the application called Notes and then click on Edit Settings.

• Now you're at the application setting control box where you can change the permission.

Individual Note Permission

In each note, you should find something similar to the following at the bottom of the note when you compose it. Set or change the permission as needed.

One more thing, Setting Everyone permission to both the application and the note will not make it to be visible to non-Facebook users. All users have to log in onto Facebook in order to see your note.