I wanted to make a quick comment as a professional geek to all those of you who choose to share things on Facebook.

First off, I don’t mind most of the things that you share and although some of the geeks I work with won’t touch Facebook (or Apple, Twitter, Google, Youtube or a whole slew of companies for various ethic or security choices), I rely on Facebook to communicate with my children at the moment. And to follow many other groups as it is a great took for instant communication. It is quite useless at a whole myriad of other communication but it is trying very hard to be a one stop shop.

I will tell you one thing that I know about Facebook privacy though…

But if you are playing games or testing your IQ or doing quizzes on Facebook, can you do me a favor please? Follow these simple little instructions and save me some grief (and maybe you too). I am going to use an example from today on a great young lady’s post where one of her friends was questioning the security of Facebook Apps.

Elise made the following comment to Katarina who posted the picture above showing all the most popular words she used on Facebook in the past year.

And while you are at it, why not give strangers access to all your info on FB? What could go wrong… don’t you wonder why they want to know all about your FB contents? It also allows them access to much about your friends and family too..

And here is my answer to Elise…

1. You can’t stop people from sharing your info if you gave it to them. The same way you can’t stop me from giving out your cell phone number or email address if you gave them to me.
2. You can share this blog post so that your friends know how to be a little more secure with their data, and yours.

My test with the vonvon app that Katarina posted…

Please always read what the App developers are receiving. If you disagree with what you are sending you can simply cancel or choose to edit and see what happens. In this case I am going to have to totally disagree with vonvon receiving my “friend list” but I still really want to know what words I used on Facebook the most last year. I basically want to know if d-bag or ass-hat are going to show up in the top three.

The word “required” is behind my public profile but nothing else. Instinctively, I un-check the “Friend list” selection because I personally don’t think it is nice to share that list with vonvon.

I leave the “Timeline posts”, “Likes”, and my “Email address” because I simple don’t care if the world sees those things because I share them online publicly to anyone.

The most important thing I watch for is that little lock that says “This doesn’t let the app post to Facebook”.  I remember once I downloaded an app for a video conference and without paying attention let it install and started watching the presentation… then came the Q&A session where I was apparently quite vocal. Surprise surprise eh?

The App went and posted all my questions as new posts in my personal account so all my friends were seeing “What kind of encryption does the software use?” You can imagine that my friends, who were not part of the presentation, had no idea what I was talking about. I continued to post another dozen questions while my friends were messaging me that they thought my account had been hacked.

I am a good worker with great focus so I ignored their comments until the presentation was complete. I was actually ignoring them because I was concentrating so hard on the excellent presentation and needed to focus my focus one one thing… the ADHD makes that difficult as you can imagine.

As odd as I thought it was for Katarina’s top word of the years to be “pants” (I mean how many times can you talk about pants in Facebook?), why on earth do I use the word “get” so much? People, love, St. Albert (or Albert anyway), kids and scouts are all words that don’t surprise me in the least.

I am sure that it would change if I gave it my friends list but I am simply not willing to do that. I will however, take away more information to see if my picture changes. When I removed “Likes” and my “Email address” I now see a few different words… but for the most part it looks pretty much the same.

Now that you know where to look to ensure that you are only sharing what you want to share, go out and have fun.  Just by being on Facebook you will probably ensure that you get infected with something but it should be much less concerning than anything you might get from Tinder.