s/o Vaguebooking...others telling MY personal business on FB

My friends lost their baby when she was 7 months pregnant. It was such a hard time for them. Some people would post vague condolances on their walls without them ever sharing it themselves on Facebook. Vague things like "thinking of you", "praying for your family tonight" etc. It must have added stress to them, having to answer questions from others that hadn't heard about it yet. The husband kept deleting the wall posts.

I had a guy I used to work with post a rant about the company. Where I still work. On my status. I promptly deleted it then PMed him asking if he was trying to get me fired?

I never mention where I work in any way on line. Period. He understood and apologized but it made me much more aware.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

You do realize that, depending on what your settings are, once a friend comments on your post that now all their friends can see that post? I may not have people on my page that would rob my house, but a couple of years ago I had friends who were friends with people who did break into people's houses.

Missmiss -- comments on facebook sometimes show up on the feeds of people you personally have no relationship with. Not only that, but you have no way of knowing who is looking at one of your friends' pages or feeds-- their rotten BIL? Their neighbor reading over their shoulder? A co-worker? Basically, anything posted of facebook should be considered published for the world to see, with the possible exception of private groups with closed memberships or your own personal messages.

I'm always a bit shocked at how much information is visible/available in some people's posts and photos -- I have a large computer screen, and when photos come up full sized, I can read papers posted on the fridge in the background of a photo of the cat, or I can read all the titles on their bookshelves. Usually that kind of stuff falls into the realm of ok for public consumption, but sometimes there are things in one's life that should just be private.

Someone up-thread suggested it was a generational thing, with the older folks being more "paranoid". That's not been my experience at all. My kids/younger sibs are far more selective about what they share online than my parents and aunts and uncles (70 and 80 year olds). My observation is that we use facebook differently, with different types of people included, so it's not surprising that we filter our content differently. My kids very likely have almost every classmate and team mate they've ever encountered on FB-- so they're not putting anything on there that they wouldn't be comfortable putting on exhibit in a full school assembly. I have co-workers, neighbors, parents of girls my sons date, my son's therapists-- a huge array of people from many different realms -- I too am selective where and how I post. I make a lot of use of private groups and personal messages. My parents and their generation have a lot of family contacts as well as long-lost-friends-recently-found on FB -- and they apparently don't feel the need to filter. Just cast a broad net and chat with whoever responds.

I'll give you an example from our life. My son was referred to hospice/palliative services this summer. He's stable, but has a lot of health issues. My mom posted some well-meant but way too revealing stuff on her wall, his wall and mine -- not realizing that he has school friends, teachers, therapists, school administrators as friends, and their understanding of what "hospice" means is perhaps very different from the reality in my son's life. His one on one para for the coming school year panicked and called me asking if she needs to be looking for a new job. Classmates think he's on the verge of death. Various friends of my moms pepper us with alternative medicine suggestions and intrusive questions, and relatives I've never met overstep boundaries and say things that are just plain annoying. It's true that he's on hospice, it's not a big "secret", but it's also not something that we are broadcasting, and it's not been helpful to have to deal with all the fallout.

Rule of thumb -- medical information, be it big deals or minor -- is the personal property of the person most directly involved. They get to choose how or if it's publicized.

Yep, I certainly wouldn't make a big deal out of people writing nice posts on my FB wall.  What you could do is change your privacy settings so people cannot post on your wall. There might even be a way to do it to where you have to approve the posts. There's lots of settings you can mess with to filter out stuff you don't want others to see.

Is 700 OK?

I post them all...but if anyone thinks they are going to score by robbing my house while I'm gone, they're in for a huge surprise. No matter where I am, there's always someone at the house.

As for people posting stuff on my wall, I blocked everyone from doing that, including my kids and DH. Everyone can comment on stuff I post (like my 700 awesome pictures ), but no-one can post unsolicited pictures, jokes, cartoons or comments.