spreading jam

As a social media planner, I log into Facebook every day to research, plan, manage and moderate on behalf of clients.

As a person living in London in 2010, I use Facebook every evening to easily keep in touch with a core group of my friends, and passively keep up to speed with a few hundred other people-who-I-no-longer-physically-see. In return for these stalking rights I reciprocally allow this outer group access to my updates.

Being a social media practitioner and a web savvy individual, I know how to tweak the Facebook security settings to prevent Google and the 400m+ other Facebook users from seeing my holiday snaps and inane status updates.

I definitely know about the settings on Twitter. There is only one. ‘Protect my tweets’.

Well, I thought I knew all about the Facebook security settings – until I saw this infographic on the  New York Times. It shows how ludicrously complex Facebook settings actually are.

While 50 settings and over 170 options does give precise control over security, it does increase the chance for error – particularly when you consider that 4.6m of its users are 55+. I guess increased complexity comes hand in hand with managing such a large and open web platform.

Click to see the image at full size.

via NYT