Facebook Privacy Watcher color codes posts based on privacy settings

Content that you post on Facebook is only visible to users that you specify. You can allow your family to view this year's vacation videos, your college class to view last night's party pictures, write something that is visible to everyone, or limit visibility to yourself only.

Facebook highlights the visibility of a post. A privacy symbol is attached to each header that visualizes who sees the post when they open your Facebook page or their timeline.

While the information is displayed for each post, it is easy to overlook as they consist only of a small icon that is displayed next to the data of posting and location.

It can be overlooked easily and if you plan to go through all of your posts to check their visibility you will spend quite some time doing so.

The Mozilla Firefox add-on Facebook Privacy Watcher improves the visibility of posts on the website.

The first thing it does is color code any post that you have made on your profile page so that you know on first glance who has access to it.

• Green posts are visible to the public.
• Yellow posts are only visible to friends.
• Red posts are only visible to you.
• Blue posts have custom visibility settings.

That's however not the only change it introduces on Facebook.

The second feature is an option to change a post's visibility with two clicks. All you need to do is click on a post to display a color wheel near the cursor.

The wheel displays the same four colors that the extension uses to visualize visibility settings on the social networking site. A click on a color switches the post's visibility right away.

You will notice this as the visibility icon that Facebook displays and the color that the extension adds change in the process.

Side note: I seem to recall that a userscript that does the same thing but cannot find the review for it. Anyone?

Closing Words

So who is Facebook Privacy Watcher for? It is a useful tool for heavy Facebook users and new users of the site who like assistance when it comes to post visibility.

If you are an experienced user on the site it may not be that useful in day to day operations as it is possible to check the visibility settings of posts right away without it.

It may however be useful if you need to change the visibility of a number of posts on Facebook as it is easier to use than Facebook's own option to to so.

Now You: How do you handle your privacy on social networking sites?

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