Check your Facebook privacy settings: Your old posts might be public

Facebook is taking on Google and Twitter in an effort to dominate the entire web world — and, like it or not, you're going to help them do it. 

Facebook just became a little less private. If you've ever posted anything with public settings, deliberately or by mistake, those posts are now just between you, your friends and about a billion other users.

It's all for the greater good of the empire. 

Last week, Facebook introduced an update to its search feature which includes every public post ever made. There's a way to protect yourself. The CBC's Conrad Collaco spoke with CBC technology columnist Jesse Hirsh about recent changes to Facebook. Listen to the full interview by clicking the image at the top of this page. You can also read a summary of the interview below.

Why did Facebook tinker with its search engine?

It's about the competition and the extent to which real-time search has become a staple of social media. When breaking news happens, people turn to social media to find out more, to engage with their friends. That's where Twitter has been doing a much better job than Facebook at facilitating that gathering around breaking news. The changes are about real time and discoverability — the ability to find out what Facebook users are talking about. It's an expansion of Facebook search capabilities with a desire to capture more real-time traffic. It gives people more reason to spend more time on Facebook, but also gives incentive to turn to Facebook to find what people are saying especially outside of their own circle of friends.

How do these changes allow Facebook to make public a users old posts?

Facebook has been around for over 10 years. People have been posting all that time without the intention of having those posts made accessible to a global audience. They are enabling all of those posts for public viewing. They are all discoverable. We saw this in the federal election. A number of candidates were embarrassed or disqualified because of a number of old posts they made on Facebook. Now we are all subject to that scrutiny. Anyone can search your old Facebook posts unless you had the foresight to label them as private. A lot of people didn't because they made the assumption those posts were not accessible. Now they are.

What can you do now if you don't want your posts to be public?  

Regularly run a privacy audit on your account. That's just a sane, regular practice. Facebook does have a privacy checkup. You can also change your setting on all your old posts in bulk. It's not that difficult to retroactively protect all those things you have ever posted. That requires that people know they should do this. I suspect that most people not listening to us right now will have no idea that most of these changes have taken place. 

Facebook's changes are now live, but they haven't made much effort to tell people about them. Most people may be oblivious to the reality some of their old posts are now globally accessible until they are embarrassed or stung by a post that has now come back to haunt them. 

I've heard it said that this corporate, social media battle is like The Game of Thrones, is that a fair analogy?

It is. I've used the phrase "the clash of the Titans" out of Greek mythology. Game of Thrones makes sense given the ruthless nature in which these companies are going after each other's throats. Facebook also re-announced the introduction of video. It's their desire to go after YouTube. They have made it easier for users to upload video but have also courted publishers like the CBC. 

Facebook, Twitter and Google are all massive companies when it comes to the data they collect about us. Facebook's desire to go after video and real-time data speaks to an ambition to move laterally and enter into their competitors' markets by leveraging what they do best, which is control our data and know what we are interested in and most likely to click on. It's an interesting move that will certainly involve a lot of drama and competition but may, to go back to your Game of Thrones analogy, involve a lot of innocent people having their blood flow as it's their privacy that ends up getting caught in the middle. 

Any indication how Twitter and Google plan to respond?

Twitter has been making a lot of effort to move towards curation. They've got this new thing on their mobile app called "highlights," which you can load at any time and it will aggregate what people in your Twitter feed have been tweeting. If you've been off for a while, it aggregates some of the best tweets of the last few hours. That's Twitter taking a page out of Facebook's book when it comes to the algorithm and the news feed. 

Twitter is also expanding video capability to go after Google (YouTube). There are even rumours that Twitter may lift the limit of 140 characters. The company is struggling to figure out how to get more users now that its growth has stagnated. And YouTube has introduced a subscription platform going after Netflix. All of these companies are trying new things, but Facebook has an incredible advantage. It has an intimate knowledge of our data. If they can use that to personalize and customize our search results that gives them a huge advantage over Twitter and a modest advantage over Google.