Claim: Message provides instructions for stopping others from seeing your activity on Facebook.
Example:[Collected on Facebook, December 2011]
With the new 'FB timeline' on its way this week for EVERYONE... please do both of us a favor. Hover over my name above. In a few seconds you'll see a box that says "Subscribed". Hover over that, go to "Comments and Likes" and unclick it. That will stop my posts and yours to me from showing up on the side bar for everyone to see, but MOST IMPORTANTLY IT LIMITS HACKERS from invading our profiles. If you repost this I will do the same for you.
Origins: The message cited above, which provides a warning and purported solution for stopping "hackers from invading your profile" in conjunction with the rollout of Facebook's Timeline feature, is very similar to a message which began circulating a few months earlier during the introduction of Facebook's Ticker (a real time list displaying what your Facebook friends are doing). As Sophos noted of that earlier message, the proposed solution is time-consuming and doesn't address the real issue of whether other people can see your activity on Facebook:
This appears to be the most commonly suggested solution on Facebook, and it's rubbish! It still doesn't stop *your* posts being broadcast. It's an illusion. This option stops you seeing when other people have broadcast a message to a wide audience. It does *not* stop your actions being broadcast by your friends!
You have to do this for every single one of your friends. Time consuming *and* it does not solve the problem — it just stops you from seeing it.
Please don't spread this advice, as it is confusing people and stopping the real problem from being fixed.
Sophos advised that:
The problem is complicated to explain, but the solution is simple. If you want to stop strangers from seeing everything you do, you and your friends need to change your privacy settings to "Friends" or custom lists. That's it.
The hard part is getting your friends to do it.
If you find your friends aren't understanding the issue, forget about explaining the details and "copy and paste" this to your status:
"If you don't want your actions broadcast to everyone via the ticker/News Feed please set your privacy to 'Friends' and ask your friends to do the same. Pass it on."
