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>>Brian Tong: Facebook recently made new changes that affect your privacy. So if you care about it, we're going to explain the changes and show you how to take back your privacy. Now, Facebook has changed how outside developers handle your data. Previously, the could hold onto it for 24 hours but now they can keep it as long as they want. So, if you're using applications or services with partner sites like Twitter, YouTube or an unknown one on Facebook, your Facebook data is all theirs. Now, do you guys really trust these sites with all your personal info? If you want to minimize that exposure, go to your account in the top right hand corner, then application settings and then from the show drop down select authorize. You'll see all the partner sites and apps your data is being sent to and there are probably many that you don't use anymore or don't want to share your info with so click on the X to remove them.
Now, if you want to keep certain apps active, jump into edit settings to checkout their permissions and see if you're comfortable with them. Thanks goes to Lifehacker Kevin Perdy for that tip. Now, Facebook is also rolling out a new feature called Connections that publicly shares your bio information that you use to be able to control in your privacy setting. These are things like your current city, hometown, education, work, likes and interests. Now, if you had an interest in something like Justin Bieber, it would now be public and your account will now be connected to the Justin Bieber interest page. Do you want everyone to know that about you? I don't. But it could be something more personal like your political stance, religion or legalization of marijuana. Now, before you could control who sees that but not with the new Connections feature. To keep this stuff private, you need to opt out. You might have seen this dialog box when you logged in and didn't know what to do with it, but the next time you see it, click on choose pages individually and uncheck the connections you do not want to make public. If you already selected link all to my profile and now you want to remove all those connections, because honestly most of us had no idea what it meant at the time, go to your profiles info tab, scroll down and click on one of the pages that was automatically linked and unlike it. The info from your bio that turn into publicly linked connections, thanks to Facebook. are now gone. But don't worry, you can manually enter in the bio info you want in the free form text box below your profile picture and it will stay private on your profile.
I'm Brian Tong for CNET.com and as Facebook opens up more and more, the privacy controls we have are lessening for no apparent reason and hopefully this how to will give you back some of that control and as always, use it wisely.
