Why We’re Lying on Facebook | News

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Telling those little white lies is becoming more and more popular on Facebook. According to Consumer Reports, more and more people are changing their personal information over privacy concerns.

Even though it’s against Facebook’s policy, more and more people are changing their names, birth dates, their age — even their location, all in an effort to protect their privacy.

According to Consumer Reports, 25 percent of Facebook’s users said they’ve falsified information. That number is up from just 10 percent two years ago. Consumer Reports says the increase in people doing this is proof that users are becoming more wary of Facbook’s privacy controls.

Facebook Tracks You

Even if you don’t use the social site, Facebook still gets a report every time you visit a site with a Facebook “Like” button — even if you never click it.

While computer users can’t do anything about that, there are some things you can do to protect yourself from Facebook Internet trolls.

Turn off “tag suggest.” This will prevent Facebook from automatically recognizing your face in photos, preventing your friends from tagging you each time you pop up in a friend of a friend’s photo. To learn how to do this, click here.

Take advantage of your lists. By creating lists, you can select which group of friends sees information you post on your timeline.

“Un-public” your wall. Set the audience for all previous wall posts to “just friends.” With Facebook’s new Timeline, many posts, galleries and comments that were previously visible to just “friends,” are now publicly visible to everyone. One way to change that is to limit the audience, or “un-public” your wall. To do this:

1.) Click the dropdown arrow in the top right corner near your name.

2.) Click privacy settings

3.) Scroll down until you see “Limit the Audience for Past Posts” and click “Manage Past Post Visibility” to the right. See picture below.

4.) Click the “Limit Old Posts” button. Then click confirm.