Can people get around the privacy safeguards on Facebook?

here is my Facebook page. I have the maximum security setting, save that I allow people to send me messages and request me as a Friend. This is all anyone that is not a “friend” gets to see.

The biggest thing you have to worry about is putting something stupid up as your main profile picture. The one with you hanging over the toilet at that frat party? Not a good idea.

I don’t use facebook but I read alot about stuff in website land. Facebook loves to change your settings every couple months. So you might think your settings are proper and they change shit around.

With Facebook you are a product and advertisers want your info.

There are several ways to answer this.

1. No, as a rule, employers and admissions officers cannot circumvent Facebook’s privacy controls. They’re there for that reason.

2. Maybe, because Facebook’s privacy settings are a complicated, frequently changed, and poorly understood morass of suck, users might not have everything shut down as tightly as they might think.

3. Assume yes, they can. Never post anything on the interwebz that you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of your local newspaper. Like @johnpowell says, Facebook is notorious for adding new privacy settings and defaulting them to make your private info public.

I have my privacy settings set mostly to friends only. But I do post photos of some of my crafts that I sell, my card has my name on it, and “someone” local might go looking to see if have posted any new pieces.

By force of habit I generally only post inoccuous comments on my own wall or on other people’s pages, but I found myself this close to making a political comment this evening.
I stopped because I was concerned about who, other than my designated friends, might see it and turned to Fluther for a fast answer.

I am not worried about a friend – or what passes for a friend on Facebook – seeing an opinion. My concern is whether people can circumvent the safeguards and get to my page.

I guess I had better deep-six those forty year old pictures from my days in the fraternity in college, although those old Polaroids really don’t scan very well.

Thanks
SRM

With facebook constantly making changes and updating their website, looppholes are bound to be discovered by hackers and wanna be hackers to getting around their security, so anytime a website makes a change, that’s when they’re most vulnerable to attack.

But as far as I know, there’s no way for anyone to skirt around facebook’s security, for both their website and a user’s private profile.