The stuff we shared represents a lot about us and is always vulnerable over the Internet, be it a personal photograph or our personal details.  And since Facebook is becoming more public every other day, keeping our info on Facebook is getting harder. Facebook is continuously improving the privacy features which are capable of making your presence on Facebook almost anonymous, but most of us don’t know much about these features.

So, we’ve created this comprehensive up-to-date guide which would definitely make your presence more secure on Facebook.  This guide will significantly strengthen the privacy of content-sharing and would ensure that your Facebook stuff is shared only among the trusted people.

1.Hiding Contact Info:

Sharing your contact info with unknowns can put you in trouble. Contact info is specified by user himself and basically it includes your email, your address, contact number, etc. If you’ve specified contact info on your timeline, you can control its privacy.

For hiding your contact info, go to your timeline and look for “About me” option under your profile picture. In next page, look for “Contact info” column and click “edit”.  A pop up containing all your contact info will be opened and at the end of each detail you’ll find a drop down list denoted by icon as circled above in the picture.  From there you can specify to whom with you want to share this info, three options are available- Public, friends, none. Once done, press the “save” button at the end of the popped window.

2.Timeline and Tagging

Guidelines below will help you to manage your timeline and tagging feature of Facebook.

Tagging

Tagging is one of the most intelligent features of Facebook and one of the most annoying too. Why annoying? It is annoying because sometimes your friends tag you in a picture which you don’t want to share with your friends and sometime they tag you in a picture which is not concerned to you in any way. So to control that Facebook has a privacy optionTimeline review which let you to review the Tagged posts before posting it on your Wall. 

For enabling Timeline review privacy option, Go to Account settings> Timeline and Tagging. There you’ll find an option- “How can I manage tags people add and tagging suggestions?” Enable the review option from there as shown in the picture above.

Timeline

Further, you can also make your timeline more private. There are privacy options that allow you to hide your timeline’s posts from anyone and moreover you can also control the “Right to post on your wall”.  For enabling these privacy features, Go to Account settings> Timeline and Tagging and change the settings according to your need. (See pic above)

3.Message Filtering 

Sometimes you receive unexpected messages from unknowns. These unknown messages messed up your inbox and for keeping these unexpected messages away, Facebook recently added Message Filtering option.  If you will enable this option, all messages from unknowns were dropped in “others” box.

For enabling this option Go to Messages>Others>Edit Preferences. A pop up will be opened and choose the one from given options- either basic or strict. Basic filtering will work as usual whereas strict filtering will keep away unknown messages from your Inbox.

4.Who can search you and see your stuff?

Your Facebook stuff including timeline is public by default. But Facebook provides you some powerful privacy settings with which you can hide yourself completely on Facebook. For managing privacy settings, Go to Privacy Settings and Tools.  In that section, you’ll find two privacy settings:

Who can see my stuff?

• Using this option, you can manage privacy settings like- Who can see your future posts? You can set it to public, friends, only you or even to custom.

• You can even review all your posts and things you're tagged in using Activity Log. Activity log contains the record of your every action on Facebook like pages you liked, posts you were tagged in, your comments, etc. This way you can also control the sharing of your activity.

• Further, you can even limit the audience for posts. You can decide whether you want to share past posts with friends of friends or Public?

Who can look me up?

• You can decide that who can look you up using email or contact number. For enabling this, Go to Privacy Settings and Tools and under “who can look me up” change the privacy settings according to your needs.

• Apart from this, you can even disable the Indexing of your profile by search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. For disabling indexing, Go to Privacy Settings and Tools and under “who can look me up” turn the indexing option off. .

5.Facebook Account Security

It’s possible that right now someone is trying hard to break into your account. However, hacking a Facebook account is almost impossible but your negligence like poor password, etc. can make it possible. Here are few suggestions that will definitely make your account much safer than ever.

Strong Password

Applying a weak password just only because you don’t want to forget it- is the dumbest excuse. If you’re not using a password that isn’t 8-10 character long, doesn’t include both uppercase and lower case letters and don’t include a numeric character then believe us your account is more vulnerable to hacking. 

Enable Secure browsing

You can use your Facebook in “https” mode which will encrypt all your Facebook activity between Facebook Server and your computer. For enabling secure browsing, Go to Account Settings> Security and enable the secure browsing from there.

Enabling Login Notification

Enabling Login Notifications will inform you whenever your account is accessed from unknown or unrecognized device or location either via email or by SMS. For enabling login notifications, Go to Account Settings> Security and enable the secure browsing from there.

• Must Check:How to Protect Your Facebook Account.

6.Blocking

If someone is annoying you or there’s someone from whom you want to hide on Facebook, you can block him/her. Once you blocked someone, he/she won’t be able to contact you on Facebook; in fact he/she won’t be able to even find you on Facebook.  For blocking someone, Go to the profile of that person and click the settings icon just after the message button (Pic above). Choose the block option and confirm the blocking.

• And if ever you think of unblocking someone, go to Account settings>Blocking and unblock him/her from there (Pic Above).

7.Privacy Shortcuts

Recently Facebook introduced the Privacy shortcut feature on the Facebook which is indeed a great addition to the Facebook. You can quickly configure the Messaging filters, quickly block someone and configure the privacy of your posts right from the news feed page.

8.Applying Privacy to Media files and posts

For configuring privacy of a status before posting, click the Public button just before Post button and from there you can specify the privacy of that post (Pic above).

For configuring privacy of a picture, open the picture, click the list menu button and from there you can specify the privacy of that picture (Pic above).

For configuring privacy of an album, Go to Photos> Albums, under the album name, click the list menu button and specify the privacy of that album from the list (Pic above).

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The Kindle Fire 2 may feature GPS and a mapping service provided by Nokia.
ZoomTalk about the Kindle Fire HD (2) is heating up now that the supposed big reveal is next week. Earlier this week, supposed screens surfaced showing a nearly-identical form factor save for a front-facing camera. Now Reuters is reporting that Amazon has chosen Nokia to provide a mapping service for the Kindle Fire successor, indicating that the device will sport GPS functionality.
According to the report, anonymous sources claim that Amazon has added location abilities to the new Kindle Fire, but it's currently unknown if the tablet will indeed feature a GPS chip, or use Wi-Fi-based location. It will likely be the former hardware-based option given that Google has included GPS receiver chips in the just-released 7-inch Nexus 7.
After acquiring Navteq back in 2007, Nokia became one of the world's largest mapping companies. An alliance with Amazon would mean the online retailer will be able to develop a native client for the Kindle Fire and other GPS-enabled devices such as the rumored Amazon smartphone. It will also put Amazon in a better position to compete with Google on a features level, as the original Kindle Fire did not have a native mapping client.
Back in July, Amazon purchased 3D mapping startup developer UpNext. Reports claimed that as part of the acquisition deal, the 4-man team would head to Seattle and take the reigns of Amazon's core mapping efforts. Previously UpNext offered apps for the iPad, iPhone and Android devices, covering 50 cities nationwide but offering enhanced 3D details for 23 cities.
Next week Amazon is rumored to be refreshing its entire Kindle line, launching the 7-inch Kindle Fire HD (2), the 10-inch Kindle Fire XL, the revised 7-inch Kindle Fire with a reduced price, a new Kindle Touch with color and a backlit display, and an updated non-touch Kindle with a backlit display and color graphics. Amazon is also slated to reveal discounted version supported by advertisements

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Bing has introduced a new feature that allows users to search Facebook photos within the search engine. Users can access this via Bing social sidebar or by visiting www.bing.com/friendsphotos.

When you use Bing search engine to browse photos, you will get results arranged in Pinterest-style waterfall layout, as in the image below:

The new feature also enables users to look for photos by keywords (matching texts in photo captions or album titles). It may be noted here this feature isn't available on Facebook right now. “With more than 300 million photos uploaded to Facebook per day, photo viewing is one of the most popular things people do on Facebook,” Bing wrote in a blog post. “Bing now lets you quickly find that special photo (out of your friends’ thousands) on Facebook with the new Friends’ Photo feature.”

Bing has also taken care of users' privacy, as it only lists photos that have been made public or viewable to friends by a user. Once users access this tool, images appear as a news feed, showing the most recent picture uploaded first. This tool also lets users comment, like and share Facebook photos, within the search engine.

The search engine on the top will have autofill while entering a friend's name. Moreover, users are also given choice to only display photos posted by their friends, or photos posted by fan pages.

The new Facebook tool comes weeks after Microsoft revamped Bing by deepening Facebook integration into the search engine. The company also introduced sidebar that allows friends on social networks to guide on a search. Bing also got an instant snapshot column, which features additional information and links to useful content such as maps, reviews and reservation tools.

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Facebook said this week that it has fixed a glitch that allowed links to deleted photos to stay live long after a user thought they'd been banished from the site.

Photos that users have deleted are quickly removed from Facebook profiles and newsfeeds, but if you happened to have a link to the deleted pic, that link stayed live for some time. An update to the Facebook network, however, has fixed the problem, a spokesman for the social network said.

"As a result of work on our policies and infrastructure we have instituted a 'max-age' of 30 days for our content distribution network (CDN) links," the spokesman said. "However, in some cases the content will expire on the CDN much more quickly, based on a number of factors."

"To be clear, the photos stop being shown to other users on Facebook immediately when the photo is first deleted by the user," he continued. "The 30 day window only applies to the cached images on the CDN."

The update was first noted by Ars Technica, which said the photo-deletion problem has been plaguing Facebook users for three years. The publication first questioned Facebook about the issue in 2009 and discovered back in February that it was still unresolved.

Twitter and Flickr manage to delete photos from their CDNs in "mere seconds," Ars said, but MySpace took months and Facebook took more than a year.

Ars tested out photo deletion on Instagram, which Facebook just acquired for $1 billion, and found that aside from a four-month delay on one photo, other pics were instantly deleted from Instagram's servers.

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Fakebook? Facebots? Either way, Facebook needs to address its 83 million fake accounts, many linked to click fraud, before its reputation slides further.

Just when Zuckerberg et al thought it couldn't get any worse, it gets worse.

Ever since its IPO in May, Facebook's stock price has been circling the big drain like a beloved family goldfish. (What was his name again?) Zucky's personal wealth dropped to a mere $12.1 billion last week, according to Bloomberg Business Week. He probably can't even rate acorner booth at Buck's with that paltry fortune.

Now it seems that Facebook is riddled with fake profiles -- some 83 million of them, according to its own estimates. In an SEC filing this week, the social network admitted that 8.7 percent of its 955 million active members are using duplicate or false accounts. Of those, about half are simply duplicate accounts for legit Facebook members, the company says. Another third or so are personal accounts for businesses, organizations, or pets that really should be Facebook Pages. What's left are the problem children: the 15 million or so bot accounts that are used for spamming, malware distribution, and click fraud.

If you've been following Facebook lately, that news should hardly come as a surprise. In June, ITworld's Thank You For Not Sharing blogger Dan Tynan wrote a series of posts on the seemingly endless Facebook bots he's been encountering lately. Those bots were employed to artificially boost the Likes on the Facebook pages for small businesses -- sometimes without the businesses even being aware of it.

Last month, BBC reporter Rory Cellan-Jones set up a Facebook Page for a fake product called Virtual Bagel and bought some Facebook ads to promote it. Within a few days, the page recorded more than 3,000 Likes -- at least some of which came from fake accounts. Of course, every time someone clicks an ad, Facebook makes a few pennies; it doesn't matter whether the clicker is human or not.

Now we have examples of real companies bailing out of Facebook, thanks to fake clicks. Over the past few months tiny Web music e-tailer Limited Run (formerly Limited Pressing) bought some Facebook ads to promote its newly launched site, but it noticed something funky going on. Four out of every five clicks on its ads appeared to be from bots. Limited Run decided to bail on Facebook, but first, the employees wrote a blog post about the decision -- and about Facebook's demands for $2,000 a month to let the company change the name of the Facebook page:

Facebook was charging us for clicks, yet we could only verify about 20% of them actually showing up on our site. ... So we did what any good developers would do. We built a page logger. Any time a page was loaded, we'd keep track of it. You know what we found? The 80% of clicks we were paying for were from bots. That's correct. Bots were loading pages and driving up our advertising costs. So we tried contacting Facebook about this. Unfortunately, they wouldn't reply. Do we know who the bots belong too? No. Are we accusing Facebook of using bots to drive up advertising revenue. No. Is it strange? Yes.

That post generated a lot more attention than the LR guys expected. The story got covered by theNew York Times, Wired, SlashGear, and several other news sites. It also got Facebook's attention in a big way. After the hubbub, the Limited Run crew decided to delete that blog post, but a cached copy was still available at blog time.

Facebook claims to be flummoxed about who's doing all that clicking on its behalf, and most of the bots seem to be based overseas. Given that botmasters aren't known for their pro bono work on behalf of multi-billion-dollar corporations, I suspect some rogue Facebook employee is behind this, probably in some location far far away from Palo Alto. The question is, how motivated is Facebook to find this person?

There is a thriving business in fake Facebook accounts, and it's been going for some time. To be fair, there's an equally thriving business in fake Twitter accounts, G+ profiles, YouTube clicks, and the like. On the InterWebs, nobody knows you're a dog. Facebook has gradually been trying to shut these down -- the site YouLikeHits.com, for example, was ordered by Facebook's legal eagles tostop selling Likes back in June. That's a very small drop in a rather large bucket.

If Facebook wants its business model to survive, it needs to clean up its act in a hurry, before the big advertising fish start bailing. That, or rescind its IPO and go private again, where the fakes and frauds are easier to hide.

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has denied rumours that the company is working with HTC to produce self-branded smartphone with an exclusive operating system.

At the company's first-ever earnings call, Zuckerberg said that “it would not really make much sense” to build a Facebook phone. He further pointed out that Facebook is most used app on all platforms, therefore every phone out there is a Facebook phone.

Zuckerberg's comments are likely to put an end to all sorts of speculations related to Facbeook developing self-branded phone.

Recently, Bloomberg reported that Facebook and HTC were working closely on the Facebook phone, slated to launch mid-2013. The report further said the phone was supposed to launch this year but then the release was pushed back to give HTC more time to work on other phones.

Back in April, HTC was rumoured to be working on a Facebook phone with an 'exclusive operating system'. Another rumour surfaced in May saying the phone will be released next year. 

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Facebook may enjoy the status of the world's largest social networking website, but when it comes to customer satisfaction, rival Google+ ranks way ahead of it. According to the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) E-Business Report, Facebook is now one of the least liked social media sites in its index, while Google+ and Wikipedia are on the top of the list.

Facebook has dropped by 8 percent with a score of 61 out of 100 points. The report also details what things people dislike about the world's most populous social network. One of the most frequent complaints about Facebook is the frequent nature of tweaks to its user interface, including the launch of a new Timeline profile.

Google+, which is often mocked as the ghost town, has scored 78 points in the index. According to the report, people appreciate Google+ for lesser stress on advertising. Google+ was included in the list for the first time.

“Facebook and Google+ are competing on two critical fronts: customer experience and market penetration. Google+ handily wins the former, and Facebook handily wins the latter, for now,” Larry Freed, President and CEO of ForeSee, said in a release. “It’s worth asking how much customer satisfaction matters for Facebook, given its unrivaled 800 million user base. But I expect Google to leverage its multiple properties and mobile capabilities to attract users at a rapid pace. If Facebook doesn’t feel the pressure to improve customer satisfaction now, that may soon change.” 

Even LinkedIn, the professional social networking site, scores better than Facebook in the customer satisfaction with a rating of 63. YouTube, which is owned by Google, bagged 73; Pinterest 73; and Twitter 64 points.

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No more “Arggh! Copy, delete, paste, edit, post.” Facebook is now rolling out the ability to edit comments, but users will be able to see the full edit history of a thread. This is just one more feature that I really liked about Google+, since I could essentially live blog with it and fix my mistakes, but that Facebook has now too.

Facebook tells me comment editing is rolling out now and will become available to everyone in the next few days on the web. There’s no comment editing yet in Facebook’s embeddable comment widget for websites or from mobile yet where that damn auto-correct lurks. Also, you still can’t edit original posts, all of which would be much more helpful than this. But I guess if you have to say or spell something wrong, do it from your desktop on someone else’s news feed post.

Facebook made a step in the right direction a year ago when it let you edit comments within a few seconds of posting them so you could fix immediately recognized typos as seen below.

Now that time limit’s been lifted. So if you come back to a post later and see you spelled Philadelphia wrong, like I did in an article this morning (bollocks!), you can change it. And if you already had these new features, you were some of the lucky testers, and soon your friends will get comment editing too.

With the new Edit History, though, curious parties can investigate. So don’t go back and change your change your controversial point of view on to something more palatable or you could get called out. As soon as I get these features I’ll add screenshots.

We’re waiting to hear back from Facebook on whether comment editing will be available in its Comments Box social plugin, that many blogs including TechCrunch use to dissuade trolling.

This is all a step up from what’s currently available, which is copying your messed up comment, deleting it, starting a new comment, pasting, fixing, and posting. And when you comment something stupid or have an awful, your first inclination is to immediately delete it without copying, and then you have to pick your brain to reconstruct it.

While this update is less than groundbreaking, just like the emoticon menu it added to Chat yesterday, it makes Facebook more user friendly. Even shaving a few seconds off people’s commenting flows adds up at the scale of 900 million people.

The real question is whether Facebook will allow original post editing, which Google+ does. While useful, it could also let people retroactively change their opinions and  cause subsequent comments to make no sense. Combined with Timeline, you could essentially go back and edit your whole life, which could make people overly self-conscious and nit-picky about what they’d said in the past.

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Bret Taylor, Facebook’s chief technology officer, announced Friday afternoon he was leaving the company to start his own. It was the first major exit of a Facebook executive since its public offering nearly a month ago and signals a recurrent challenge in Silicon Valley: How to retain talent after the company goes public and employee shareholders make their millions.

Mr. Taylor has been through the cycle once before. He left Google after that company went public in 2004 and created his own social networking start-up while in residence at the Benchmark venture capital firm. He went to Facebook when it acquired his start-up, FriendFeed, in 2009.

Mr. Taylor has supervised some of Facebook’s newest and most important products, including the creation of the Open Graph that application developers can use, along with the most recent rollout of the App Center and its integration with the Apple App Store.

“I’m sad to be leaving, but I’m excited to be starting a company with my friend Kevin Gibbs,” he posted on his Facebook page Friday afternoon. He described Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, as a “mentor.”

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, was one of hundreds who clicked the “like” button on his post, followed by a statement to reporters, in which he described Mr. Taylor as a “friend and teammate.” He went on to say: “I’m grateful for all he has done for Facebook and I’m proud of what he and his teams have built. I’m also proud that we have a culture where great entrepreneurs like Bret join us and have such a big impact.”

Neither he nor Mr. Gibbs, who works at Google, said anything about what they would work on together. The two men would have overlapped at Stanford University, where they both studied computer science, and at Google. Mr. Gibbs was instrumental in developing something called the App Engine, which allowed application developers to use Google infrastructure, according to his LinkedIn profile.

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Hacking of Facebook Account is a hot topic these days. We often get to hear from friends and colleagues about someone’s Facebook account being hacked People got panicked the moment they understand that they no more have any control on their Facebook account and its now being in full control of someone unknown.

Following these steps you can easily recover your facebook account:

• Visit http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=hack_nologin_access
• Just click on  “My Account Compromised”.
• Next step would be to click on “I can’t identify my account”.
•  A new window would open as shown below. Just need to fill the fields as per instruction listed below :   
• Your email address: enter your Facebook registered email address.
• Email address to access your account: enter your email address, preferably the same email address that have used for your Facebook account.
• Do you have access to your email account: Click “Yes”, this will help Facebook to deliver password change information to your email account.
• Full name on the account: To get verified by the application, enter full name of your Facebook account.
• Date of birth, Option you use to identify your account, Mobile number: Enter all the fields for the security reasons.
• Facebook profile URL: Just copy and paste your profile URL. It can easily be done if you visit your profile from someone else’s profile.
• Any other emails you might have added to your face book id: If you have any alternative email id, provide it here.
• Description of Your issue: You need to describe how your account got hacked/stolen. Try to provide as many additional information as possible.

After completing   My Account Has Been Compromised form just click on “SUBMIT”

Note: After the verification of application form made by facebook team, you will receive the mail in your registered mail id with facebook . 

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Microsoft shortcuts has already made our task easier while operating Windows or Office programs, so we all know the importance of shortcuts. At times we get irritated by moving the mouse cursor across the Facebook to go to different pages. It won’t be a problem anymore. Facebook introduced some koolkeyboard shortcuts which works across all the popular browsers and intends to ease our Facebook life. They are not standard across all the browsers, so if you keep on changing the browser, you might need to memorize some extra “Keys”.

Try the following working shortcuts today.

Shortcuts for Facebook in Google Chrome & IE with Windows OS:

1. To open New Message window – Alt+M
2.  Facebook Search – Alt+/
3. Home (News Feeds) – Alt+1
4. Profile Page – Alt+2
5. Friend Request – Alt+3
6. Messages – Alt+4
7. Notifications – Alt+5
8. Account Settings – Alt+6
9. Privacy Settings – Alt+7
10. Facebook Fan Page – Alt+8
11. Facebook Statements & Rights Agreement – Alt+9
12. Facebook Help Centre – Alt+0

Shortcuts for Facebook in Mozilla Firefox with Windows OS:

The keyboard shortcuts in Mozilla Firefox are same as in Chrome and IE except, that you add SHIFT key. Example: To open new message window – Alt+Shift+M

Shortcuts for Facebook in Mozilla Firefox with Mac OSX:

1. To open New Message window – Function+Ctrl+M
2. Facebook Search - Function+Ctrl+/
3. Home (News Feeds) - Function+Ctrl+1
4. Profile Page - Function+Ctrl+2
5. Friend Request - Function+Ctrl+3
6. Messages - Function+Ctrl+4
7. Notifications - Function+Ctrl+5
8. Account Settings - Function+Ctrl+6
9. Privacy Settings - Function+Ctrl+7
10. Facebook Fan Page - Function+Ctrl+8
11. Facebook Statements & Rights Agreement - Function+Ctrl+9
12. Facebook Help Centre - Function+Ctrl+0

Shortcut for Facebook for Other Browsers in Mac OSX:

For other browsers like Chrome and IE, use OPTION key instead of Function key for shortcuts. Example: To open new message – Option+Ctrl+5.

Note: These keyboard shortcuts work in both laptops and desktops but do not work with num pads. 

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