You can now basically do anything you’d ever want with the new privacy controls within Facebook. So, if you want to make a list of ex-boyfriends and stop them seeing certain information about you, you can! Or, if you make a list of hotties, you can make a special photo album just for them!
Lists kind of work like groups as far as communication is concerned, but at the moment people don’t know what lists they’ve been put into by other people – they are for an individual to group/categorise their friends, for their own purposes.
I only hope the ways I’ve categorised my friends within Facebook never gets revealed to my friends!
Interestingly, this blog suggests that you can “shield your friend list from any or all of your friends and networks”, whereas this blog says the opposite, that “Friend lists are “private groups” of your friends. No one can see the friend lists you make.” Hopefully the first blog wasn’t talking about these new friend lists that a user creates and names accordingly, but was talking about a user’s main, complete, Facebook friend list. If a user’s main Facebook friend list is called a friend list and the lists a user creates to organise their Facebook friends is called a friend list, talking about this could get pretty confusing.
4 responses to “Facebook privacy with friend lists”
Thanks Christopher, but I think Dave meant he was struggling to delete a group, not a list. This is difficult because I think unless you are the only member, it won’t let you delete the group. If you are the only group admin and you leave the group, the admin role is offered to other members I think. Something like that anyway…
David, you can delete lists. Go to the list that you wish to delete and at the bottom of the page there is a very small link ‘Delete this list’.
Yeah, I know… I made a ‘people I’ve kissed’ list in Facebook for my own amusement so I could calculate what the % probability that a friend would get to kiss me would be. I better delete that list now I have the answer!
I’d be careful of that. For example, LinkedIn display your lists, which I didn’t know initially. Given the nature of LinkedIn is around business personally I had nothing to hide, so all was good.
I’ve since reorganised my Facebook groups because of this, however, once you create a group you can’t remove it, at least not that I can see.