NATIONAL FEDERATION OF YOUNG FARMERS’ CLUBS

Staying Safe on Facebook NATIONAL FEDERATION OF YOUNG FARMERS’ CLUBS NATIONAL FEDERATION OF YOUNG FARMERS’ CLUBS

Staying safe on Facebook

This guidance has been produced by the NFYFC youthwork team to help you to enjoy the benefits of Facebook whilst keeping your information private. The guidance includes:

Staying safe on Facebook

Children and Facebook

Parents

Cyberbullying and Cyberharassment

Managing your Facebook account

Passwords

Making your contact information private

Keeping your private information private

Adjusting your privacy settings

Removing yourself from Facebook search results

Removing yourself form search engines like Google

Facebook places

Avoiding the photo/video tag mistake

Protecting your photo albums

Preventing stories showing up on your friends news feed

Avoiding embarrassing wall posts

Suspicious or offensive activity

Monitoring suspicious activity on your wall

Facebook chat

Removing friends involved in suspicious activities

Reporting inappropriate or offensive content

Keeping your wall clean

Extra precautions and Links to additional support services NATIONAL FEDERATION OF YOUNG FARMERS’ CLUBS

Staying safe on Facebook

Social networking on Facebook is one of the most popular ways people socialise online. Facebook is a great way to stay in touch, invite people to social functions and share photographs. Facebook can be used effectively within your personal life and for promotion and running of your YFC. It is important to remember that Facebook can also leave you vulnerable if you share lots of personal information. Recently there have been cases of peoples houses being burgled when they post that they are on holiday and parties getting out of hand as a Facebook message had been spread far and wide. For your own safety and the safety of your YFC members we have put together some hints and tips on safe Facebook networking.

Children and Facebook

Children under 13 years old are not permitted access to Facebook. In addition, parents of children aged 13 and older should consider whether their child should be supervised while using Facebook.

Anyone under 18 who uses Facebook will have a slightly different experience with privacy than adults. Both adults and children have publicly available information (name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, friend list, page) that will appear when people navigate to their profile and may be accessed by applications that they use. Adults and children both appear in search results on Facebook.

However, the "Everyone" setting works differently for children than it does for adults. When children set information like photos or status updates to be visible to "Everyone," that information is actually visible only to their friends, friends of friends, and people in any school or work networks they have joined. Additionally, children do not have public search listings created for them, so they do not appear in outside search engines until they have turned 18.

Parents

Facebook strongly urges parents to talk to their children about the dangers they may encounter online, and to make sure their children are using Facebook in a safe manner. Parents may want to install monitoring software on home computers if they are concerned about what their children are doing online. Children must know that they should report any inappropriate or offensive Facebook content to their parents and then to Facebook using the tools made available through the site.

The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) have worked closely with Facebook to protect children online. If children feel scared at any point while on Facebook they can report the incident to CEOP which will investigate. The application and panic button is very easy to install on a profile and is an additional layer of protection for children online. NATIONAL FEDERATION OF YOUNG FARMERS’ CLUBS

How do I install the CEOP application?

Search CEOP in the Facebook search box, this will take you to the CEOP landing page where you will see this badge

You can install the CEOP application by scrolling down on the left to the following icon, clicking on this icon will take you to the CEOP page and will load the application onto your profile.

Once you have accepted the application you will have the option to send an alert to your friends to encourage them to join.

Cyberbullying and cyberharrasment

Facebook should be an environment where people can connect and share comfortably. Cyberbullying is defined as the use of any new technology to harass or intimidate someone, and there are steps you can take to prevent this kind of behaviour if it occurs. Cyberbullying is considered to be abusive behaviour from child to child, while cyberharassment typically involves adults. NATIONAL FEDERATION OF YOUNG FARMERS’ CLUBS

Cyberbullies often seek a reaction from the people they harass. When they fail to get one, they often give up gradually. Rather than responding to a bully via your Inbox, a Wall post or Facebook Chat, you can delete offensive posts from your Wall or messages from your Inbox and then use the "Block" or "Report" functions to resolve the issue safely. To delete an offensive Wall post, hover over the post in question, click the "Remove" button that appears and select "Delete" in the dialogue box. To delete a message from your Inbox, simply click the "Delete" button at the top of the message. Only confirmed friends can post to your Wall or send you a message through Chat. If you are receiving posts and Chat messages you don't like, you should consider removing the sender from your friends list.

Stop cyberbullying and cyberharassment

The following websites are two independent organisations that provide tools, resources and educational materials on Internet safety including cyberbullying and cyberharassment stopcyberbullying.org and connectsafely.org,

ConnectSafely.org offers additional information on cyberbullying and cyberharassment at http://www.connectsafely.org/Safety-Tips/tips-to-help-stop- cyberbullying.html.

Stopcyberbullying.org offers information on preventing cyberbullying and cyberharassment at http://www.stopcyberbullying.org/prevention/index.html.

Facebook is a member of the StopCyberbullying Coalition, a movement to understand, prevent and address cyberbullying affiliated with stopcyberbullying.org.

Managing your Facebook account

Facebook is an international community and without the correct security settings you could be sharing more information than you are aware with a whole host of strangers. These quick and simple tips will help to keep you safer on Facebook.

Change your password regularly

Try not to use the same easy-to-remember password on all your social networking or email accounts. For Facebook try to make the password obscure with eight characters or more using a mixture of upper and lower case characters and numbers. The more obscure the better. It can be difficult to remember but there is software that can help you remember your passwords Roboform is an example.

Be careful who you share your password with NATIONAL FEDERATION OF YOUNG FARMERS’ CLUBS

It’s best not to share your passwords with anybody, even your friends, they may think it’s funny to hack your account and make a silly post on your wall for a joke but if seen by your family and work colleagues it could damage you reputation or leave you with some explaining to do.

Hide your year of birth

It is best to hide your year of birth on your profile. This may or may not make a difference but not disclosing your year of birth could be a small step towards protecting yourself from identity theft.

How do I hide my birthday?

On your Facebook Profile, click the “Information box” underneath you profile picture, and then click “Edit Information” (or mouse over the Basic Information section and click the little pencil. From the drop-down menu next to Birthday, select “Show only month and day in my profile.”

Make your contact information private

Your contact information usually includes personal email and phone number. It’s a simple thing to set but many people forget to do it. If you don’t protect your details people you don’t know end up contacting you and you have no idea how they got your contact information. In most cases it would be better not to have any contact details on Facebook and if people want to get in touch they can contact you via private message. Avoid putting your phone number, mailing address, children's or pet's names in your profile. People often use pet's names as passwords so it is not recommended to publish them on-line.

How do I protect my contact privacy? NATIONAL FEDERATION OF YOUNG FARMERS’ CLUBS

Your contact privacy can be edited right from your profile. If you have chosen to enter this information, you should see a “Contact Information” area under the “Info” tab in your profile. If it displays, you simply click “Edit” and then a screen like the one pictured below will show up.

For each contact item that you have in your profile you should set custom privacy settings so that contacts that you aren’t close to don’t have access to your phone number and/or email. It’s a small change but it can save you the hassle of being pestered by people you don’t know well. Also, protecting your privacy is generally a good practice to get in the habit of doing. NATIONAL FEDERATION OF YOUNG FARMERS’ CLUBS

Keep your private information private

There may be lots of friends on your Facebook that you don’t know or that you wouldn’t really like to share information with. The likelihood is your close friends and family will know what you are doing day to day and you don’t mind sharing information with them. There are ways to keep all your friends but place them in different group lists for the information they receive about you.

How do I put my friends into lists?

Underneath your profile picture when you are in the ‘Home’ option there will be a list of options like the box above. Select the Friends icon

At the top of your friends page there will be an option to ‘create a list’, if you click this all you current friends will appear in a pop up box. You can enter the group/list name, which could be divided into categories such as family, close friends and work friends.

Once you have placed your friends into lists you can alter the information they see about you by editing the list. NATIONAL FEDERATION OF YOUNG FARMERS’ CLUBS

As you leave school/college/university you will apply for a number of jobs and increasingly employers and companies are beginning to Google prospective employees. Without the correct security settings in place you could be showing your new boss everything you got up to at the last farmers ball – which may be not the most professional reflection of yourself.

Adjust your privacy settings

Facebook has good privacy settings for you to decide who to share your information with. If you don’t use Facebook very often, don’t upload photos or change your status then you may be happy to leave your security settings fairly relaxed because there isn’t a lot to see. For those of you that update your status a few times a week, chat to friends and put up photo albums you may want to control your privacy settings.

How do I change my privacy settings?

Go to the ‘your account’ section of your Facebook page and select ‘privacy settings’ from the drop down menu. This will take you to the Privacy settings menu displayed below. This page gives you a summary of your current privacy settings. If you have not customised them before they will be on the Facebook default ‘recommended’ settings. NATIONAL FEDERATION OF YOUNG FARMERS’ CLUBS

To customise the settings click on the ‘customise settings’ option marked above with a star. This will take you to the display shown below. Here you can go through each privacy settings and customise it accordingly. The safest way to protect your information is to set your privacy to ‘friends only’. NATIONAL FEDERATION OF YOUNG FARMERS’ CLUBS

By restricting your information to only friends you can control who can view your information on Facebook. If you want to restrict the information that Facebook shares about you on its own website and through search engines like Google then you can do this through your privacy settings.

Remove yourself from Facebook search results

If you do not want to be found on Facebook by strangers or friends of friends then you can take yourself out of the search listings. There are many reasons that you may not want your information to show up in search results on Facebook, and it’s simple to turn off your public visibility.

How do I remove myself from Facebook search results?

On the privacy settings landing page there is a paragraph at the top named ‘basic directory information’, click on ‘view settings’ blue text, marked below with a star

This will take you to the page displayed below –

The first setting you can amend is ‘search for me on Facebook’ as displayed below, use the drop-down menu to choose your privacy setting. NATIONAL FEDERATION OF YOUNG FARMERS’ CLUBS

Managing the information Facebook displays on search engines

Facebook displays user profiles in search engines like Google. Not all of your profile is displayed, currently the information displayed in the search profile is: your profile picture, a list of your friends, a link to add you as a friend, a link to send you a message, and a list of up to approximately 20 fan pages/groups that you are a member of.

An example of a Facebook profile searched through Google

For some people, being displayed in the search engines is a great way to let people get in contact with you, especially if you don’t have an existing website. Facebook also tends to rank high in the search results, so if you do want to be easy to find, making your search profile can be a great idea. However many people don’t want any of their information to be public.

By default, Facebook makes your presence visible to everybody. Frequently, people aren’t aware of their public visibility (on search engines like Google), so this is one of the first settings that you may wish to change. NATIONAL FEDERATION OF YOUNG FARMERS’ CLUBS

If you have strong privacy settings the information that people can see about you is limited in a Google search and is displayed below.

Remove yourself from search engines like Google On your privacy settings landing page, underneath the privacy settings grid there are three options

Select the Applications and websites option; the blue text reads ‘edit your settings’ as shown.

The page below will be displayed:

Go to the last option ‘Public search’ and click on ‘edit settings’

On the next screen untick the ‘enable public search’ box. NATIONAL FEDERATION OF YOUNG FARMERS’ CLUBS

(Remember, doing so will remove you from search results, so make sure you want to be removed totally.)

Facebook places

Facebook ‘places’ is a new addition to the services Facebook offers its users. Facebook ‘places’ allows you to track where your friends are, check in to various locations and allows you to see who else is close by using GPS technology. This service could be very intrusive to its users that do not wish to be tracked or located. The new places service means that strangers who have a Facebook account can see that you are nearby if you don’t adjust your privacy settings. Even if you change your setting and prevent friends checking you into places you could still show up in a location if you have checked yourself in and strangers use the ‘people here now’ feature. Friends can share your location with other Facebook users if they check you into a location or use specific Facebook applications. The pages you create when you check into a new place are public. If you create a listing for your house called ‘Tom Smith’s house’ this becomes searchable on the internet even for those people that don’t have a Facebook account. Each page also has an automatic map powered by Bing to locate the exact location, so don’t check your house if you don’t want people knowing exactly where you live.

How do I protect my location? NATIONAL FEDERATION OF YOUNG FARMERS’ CLUBS

Go to the Privacy settings page in your account and scroll down to ‘customise settings’.

Scroll down to the ‘Places I check in to’ option and in the drop-down box on the right select the option to customise

The following box should pop up and in the ‘make this visible to’ menu the safest option is to select ‘only me’. This will give you the strongest privacy settings as other Facebook users will not be able to determine your location through the site. NATIONAL FEDERATION OF YOUNG FARMERS’ CLUBS

How do I stop people knowing where I am? The option below ‘places I check in’ is ‘include me in people here now after I check in’. This option allows friends to see you are at a location if you have checked in to say you are there. If you don’t wish to use this service then leave the ‘enable’ box unchecked.

How do I stop friends checking me into places? If you would prefer it if your friends didn’t check you into places then go to your privacy settings page and select customise settings. Scroll down to the ‘Things others share’ and the ‘friends can check me in to places’ option.

From the drop down menu select ‘disabled’, this will prevent friends from checking you into places without your permission. It is good to disable this if you don’t want NATIONAL FEDERATION OF YOUNG FARMERS’ CLUBS people to alert others to your location or if you think your friends may check you into places you wouldn’t want to be seen in as a practical joke.

Your location can also be shared by your friends through applications, to turn this off go to the ‘Applications and websites’ link at the bottom of the privacy landing page. Click on it and go to ‘information accessible through your friends’ option.

Click the ‘edit settings option’ this will take you to the box shown below. All the checked options are information that can be shared about you through applications.

The last option is ‘places I check in to’ – uncheck this option as this will prevent your friends from sharing your location through various applications. You may want to uncheck other options if you don’t want your friends to be able to use other information about you through applications. NATIONAL FEDERATION OF YOUNG FARMERS’ CLUBS

Avoid the photo/video tag mistake

Tagging photographs is one of the biggest risks about Facebook as you have little control of friends tagging you into a photograph. In the worst cases you let loose for a few hours one night (or day) and photos (or videos) of the moment are suddenly posted for all to view, not just your close friends who shared the moment with you. The result can be devastating.

Some people have been dismissed from work after incriminating photos/videos were posted for the boss to see. For others, randomly tagged photos/videos have ended personal relationships. At the least, a tagged photo/video can result in personal embarrassment.

How do I stop people tagging me in public photos?

The simple answer is – you can’t, if you are friends with people they can tag you in a photograph, you can remove this tag but by this time many people may have seen the photo or video. You can go to the offending photo and click on the remove tag label underneath the photograph. This will remove the photograph from your profile.

Protect your albums

Just because you’ve uploaded photos doesn’t mean that you’ve accurately tagged every photo correctly. Frequently people will turn of their tagged photo visibility to certain friend lists yet keep their photo albums public to the world. If you are trying to make all your photos private you must do so on an album by album basis.

How do I keep my albums private?

Go to the privacy settings landing page and select the customise settings option

This will take you to the page below where you should select the ‘edit album privacy option – marked with a star. NATIONAL FEDERATION OF YOUNG FARMERS’ CLUBS

There is a specific privacy page for your albums from which you can manually arrange the visibility of each album (as pictured below). This way you can store your photos indefinitely on Facebook yet ensure that the only people that can view your photos are the ones who you really want to see them.

This will take you to a page that lists all of your albums; scroll through all your albums and at the side change the privacy setting for each album using the drop down menu box – as shown 

Prevent stories from showing up in your friends’ news feeds

Many of us like to share details about our lives but do you really want everybody on your Facebook to know the ins and outs of your personal relationships. In the instance that a relationship does uncomfortably end, you can avoid making things more painful by avoiding a friend notification all about it. NATIONAL FEDERATION OF YOUNG FARMERS’ CLUBS

How do I stop people being notified about my relationship status?

To control how your relationship status is shared, you should customise the box next to “relationships” in the privacy setting, customise settings section.

Avoid embarrassing wall posts

Once in a while a friend of yours may post something embarrassing or not necessarily “work friendly” and it can end up having adverse effects. That’s why Facebook has provided you with the ability to customise your wall postings visibility. You can also control which friends can post on your wall.

How do I adjust my wall posting visibility?

Within your privacy profile page you can control who can view wall postings made by you. To do so, click on the “Privacy settings customise settings” select the drop- down box next to ‘posts by me’ and select the most appropriate setting.

How do I control who can post on my wall? NATIONAL FEDERATION OF YOUNG FARMERS’ CLUBS

In addition to controlling who can view wall postings published by your friends, you may also want to control which friends can post on your wall. Not everybody needs to do this, but occasionally you may want to prevent some people from posting on your page. If you visit the ‘privacy settings – customise settings’ there is a section labelled “Things others share” there you can select the privacy from the drop down menu.

From this area you can completely disable your friends’ ability to post on your wall. You can also select specific friend lists that can post on your wall. You may not really care who can post on your wall but you may want to control who can see those wall postings.

Monitor suspicious activity and links on your wall

Be alert for suspicious activity in your News Feed, your Wall and your Inbox. Never, ever click suspicious links from people or places you don’t know. They can often look harmless and even enticing e.g. “Hey come look at your photo on this blog.” Or ‘click this link for a free iPhone’ before you click ask yourself, Do you recognize the sender?

What do I do if I find an offensive group on Facebook?

You can anonymously report offensive group pictures and content by clicking on the "Report Group" link located under the group's picture.

You will be asked to specify the offensive content. Facebook will then review your complaint and will act to ensure all users comply with the Terms of Use so that Facebook remains a trusted environment where people can interact safely.

Turn off Facebook chat NATIONAL FEDERATION OF YOUNG FARMERS’ CLUBS

It can be very risky to chat with people you don’t know at all, these people could have ulterior motives for getting in touch with you. Ideally you actually know all your Facebook friends but we know that in a lot of cases people accept friends they don’t know.

Facebook says: “Remember that although using fake names is a violation of the Facebook Terms of Use, people are not always who they say they are. You should always be careful when sending friend requests to, or accepting friend requests from people you do not know in the real world. And it is always risky to meet anyone in person whom you don’t know through real world friends.”

How do I turn off Facebook chat?

To turn off Facebook chat, click the silhouette icon at the very bottom right of your browser when logged into Facebook. If you’re online (online chat) the dot will be green next to the icon and when you click the icon, in the window that pops up, click options and “Go Offline” as shown in the screenshot below.

Your dot should now turn to grey and then you are offline – as shown below.

Removing friends involved suspicious activities

Remove any friends immediately who post suspicious links on your wall and/or in emails, these friends may not even be aware they’re posting hoax links, someone may have hacked their account.

What do I do if I receive an unwanted post?

Add this person’s name to your block list by clicking onto the ‘Privacy Settings’ page. And you’ll see a heading at the bottom of the list named block list as below. NATIONAL FEDERATION OF YOUNG FARMERS’ CLUBS

The box below will then appear and you can select a person to block from your account. Facebook will identify the person’s profile and prevent them from accessing your profile and being able to message you.

Reporting inappropriate or offensive content

Facebook encourages users to report any offensive or inappropriate content by clicking on the "Report" links located on pages throughout the site. You should also report suspicious people and inappropriate content that you encounter, and encourage users under the age of 18 to talk to a parent or a responsible adult immediately if someone online says or does something to make them feel uncomfortable or threatened in any way.

In some cases it may be necessary to remove friends who send you application requests that you do not agree with. This is usually a sign they’re not quite on the same wavelength as you and may not be someone you should be friends with.

How do I remove a friend?

To remove a friend who posted suspicious links on your wall, right click their name from the wall post, open in a new tab/window, scroll towards the bottom right and click “Remove from Friends.” NATIONAL FEDERATION OF YOUNG FARMERS’ CLUBS

Keep your wall clean

Once you’ve removed the friend who posted the inappropriate links, be sure to delete the offending wall post (just in case another person should happen to click on the link).

How do I remove a wall post?

Mouse over the post and the little Edit pencil shows up; click remove. A pop up box will then confirm that you want to delete the post.

Extra precautions

To be safe on Facebook you can become part of various groups that can allow you to keep up to date with security risks and changes to privacy settings on Facebook.

How do I join?

On the privacy settings landing page click on the ‘controlling how you share’ option, marked above with a star. This page will give you more information about Facebook security settings and how to use the site safely.

If you would like to get security updates from Facebook you can join the Facebook security group, click on the security page and join the group: NATIONAL FEDERATION OF YOUNG FARMERS’ CLUBS

And finally

The best way to prevent embarrassing items from showing up on Facebook in the future is to not make bad judgements in your personal life. We’re all human though and being completely paranoid about every choice you make is probably not the best way to live your life. Be aware of what privacy settings are available and be conscious of what your friends may be publishing about you. More information can be found on using Facebook safely by clicking the privacy link at the very bottom of your account page or by using this link http://www.facebook.com/help/?safety NATIONAL FEDERATION OF YOUNG FARMERS’ CLUBS

The websites below offer additional advice on staying safe when using social networking sites:

 http://www.ceop.gov.uk/  http://www.beatbullying.org/  www.thinkuknow.co.uk  http://www.kidsmart.org.uk/  http://www.surfnetkids.com/safety.htm  OnguardOnline.gov (which includes a guide for adults called Net Cetera: Chatting With Kids About Being Online)  WiredSafety.org  Commonsense.com  ConnectSafely.org  NetSmartz.org  WebWiseKids.org  AThinLine.org