Ask DACS
June 2011

Moderated and reported by Jim Scheef.

AskDACS is a Question and Answer session before the main presentation at the monthly General Meeting. We solicit questions from the floor and then answers from other audience members.
 My role as moderator is to try to guide the discussion to a likely solution to the problem.

Prior to the session this month, we had a short presentation on IPv6 in recognition of World IPv6 Day, which was held the day after the meeting.  As a result, AskDACS was shortened. We will learn more about IPv6 in coming months.

Q – Does anyone know how to stop a PowerPoint slide show from changing automatically? (This question was prompted by my trouble with my IPv6 slides.)

A – On the ‘Slide shows’ menu, uncheck the option for ‘Use rehearsed timings’.

Q – My YouTube account has twenty subscribers; I cannot find a list of the subscribers. Does anyone know how to find the list so I can contact the subscribers?

A – I had to admit defeat on this question as I do not have a YouTube account and no one at the meeting could offer a solution from current experience.  Judging from items I found when searching on Yahoo, it appears the menus have been changed.

Q – I want to find a friend’s Facebook page but do not have a Facebook account of my own. I searched on Facebook for the person’s name but did not find the proper person.  The search results page intimated that if I were to log into Facebook, I would get more search results. Does anyone know if this is true?

A – Several members offered suggestions. The short answer is “yes, it is true”. There are numbers of privacy settings can affect how much, if any, of your Facebook profile is visible from outside Facebook. These single setting to allow or disallow outside (of Facebook) searches is almost diabolically hidden. Naturally you must be logged in to your Facebook account to change this setting. Click on ‘Account’ at the top right of any Facebook page and select ‘Privacy Settings’. On this page look at the bottom row of links for ‘Apps and Websites’, click the link for ‘Edit your settings for using apps, games and websites.’ On that page, the last item is ‘Public search’; click the ‘Edit Settings’ button. You will now see the setting for ‘Public search’ where you can check a box to ‘Enable public search’ – or not as you prefer. The description of this setting is: “Public search controls whether people who enter your name in a search engine will see a preview of your Facebook profile. Because some search engines cache information, some of your profile information may be available for a period of time after you turn public search off. See preview”. The words ‘See preview’ are a very useful link that shows you what information will be visible to someone searching outside of Facebook. The most fundamental observation here is that no one could possibly remember how to find this setting without actually searching for it.

There is also a setting to allow/disallow search within Facebook. If you disallow this you must send friend requests or otherwise tell other people on Facebook that you have a Facebook page.  Once this connection is established, your other privacy settings control what is visible to friends and friends-of-friends.

D – One member detailed his experience with the Facebook app for Blackberry phones. Installing and using this app resulted in changes to his Facebook settings (email notifications and possibly others). The implication is that this could also happen on Android and iPhones.

Beyond these search settings, everyone should periodically take the time to review all of the privacy settings on their Facebook profile. Privacy settings can be changed or nullified when you add an application to your page, so read carefully what information you are sharing when you add an app. The New York Times has several articles on Facebook security.

Q – Once you have a Facebook account, can you ever remove it completely?

A – This question has been a news item over the months. The Facebook policy statements change from time to time (as do all companies). There is an option to “deactivate” an account that makes the account inactive but does not delete the data. The intent is for you to resurrect the account at a later date. The concern would be the visibility of the inactive account to friends, friends-of-friends and the public. Read the current policy to see what Facebook says now; however, as one member pointed out, your data in “in the cloud” and you no longer have direct control. The bottom line is that you will be fine so long as you never share anything that would be embarrassing if made public.

D – In follow-on discussion a member noted that posts to bulletin boards (like the DACS Forums) are almost always indexed by search engines and are thus available widely, even though the bulletin board may be “private”. So even if you must log in to post, your message may be visible to the public. This can be of concern in health-related support groups and other sensitive discussions.

This is a good note. The degree of privacy on bulletin boards varies widely, from totally visible to completely hidden. For instance, most of the DACS forums (http://forums.dacs.org) are publicly viewable but you must create an account and log on before you can post anything. Some parts of the DACS Forums are labeled members-only and some a viewable only by members. The forum with deals and other member benefits is an example of a restricted forum.

Disclaimer: Ask DACS questions come from members by email or from the audience attending the general meeting. Answers are suggestions offered by meeting attendees and represent a consensus of those responding. DACS offers no warrantee as to the correctness of the answers and anyone following these suggestions or answers does so at their own risk. In other words, we could be totally wrong!