http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/10/12/three-facebook-privacy-loopholes/

October 12, 2012

Three Facebook Privacy Loopholes

By Geoffrey A. Fowler

Choose your friends wisely -- especially on Facebook.

The social network has offered a growing array of options and settings to control privacy, particularly for what shows up on your own page, which Facebook now calls your Timeline.

But one thing you can't control as well is what your friends post about you.

Here are three loopholes where information about you might be seen by your friends, even if you have tried to lock down your own privacy to a small subset of friends.

Groups: As the WSJ reports, any Facebook friend can add you to a group, including ones open to the public or ones with closed membership but visible to others. After a friend invites you, Facebook adds you to the group without seeking your prior approval, and meanwhile any of your friends may receive notification that you're in the group, and (if the group is public) read the conversations inside.

Tags: Friends can tag you in posts, including in photos. Facebook offers you the option, if you turn it on, to review those tags before they show up on your Timeline. But even if you have tag-review turned on, you remain tagged in those posts in other places they might show up on Facebook, including your friends' News Feeds. You can later untag yourself, but only after the fact.

Photos: What happens if a friend -- or enemy -- posts an unflattering photo of you? Since the photo belongs to your friend, you don't have the ability to take it off of Facebook. Instead, you have to ask your friend to remove the photo. Or, if the photo is particularly egregious, you can report it to Facebook as being "offensive," or otherwise violating the site's policies.

How can you keep track of all the ways your friends might be tagging you? Facebook offers a view called the Activity Log, available as a click from your own Timeline page, which lets you look back retroactively at everything where your friends have tagged you, or where you've shared something yourself.