Saturday, February 23, 2013

Facebook's parental monitor page - aka Activity Log

For the moment, until the next state mandated revision, Facebook has a Page I can use to track #1 son's Facebook activity with a URL of the form <https://www.facebook.com/first_name.last_name.2345/allactivity>. [3]

It's currently called the 'Activity Log', if you poke around you can currently find it under 'Privacy Shortcuts' (lock icon by user name in title bar) / "See More Settings" / "Privacy". Look under "Privacy Settings and Tools" for the wee link 'Use Activity Log' [6].

As far as I know it's not intended for this purpose [4]; it's designed for users to edit their visible timeline [1] . It does, however, list most of the account owners save pages visited. There's a long list of activities including Posts, tags, hidden posts, likes, comment, friends, games, following, and, most critically for this purpose, Search. [2]

So the Activity Log is a very valuable resource for a parent or guardian who wants to track their 13+ [4] child, either because this is an exceedingly good idea or because they are that kind of parent or both [5]. A parent might, for example, schedule a weekly review of the Activity Log...

 - fn -

[1] You can hide and delete posts and change post dates. It's also available for Pages and supports viewing scheduled posts.

[2] It doesn't, however, show pages visited by link. It is, incidentally, a nice summary of a fraction of the information Facebook uses to sell you.

[3] Activity Log came with timeline, but I was unaware of it until today. It's available on Facebook.app for iOS as well.

[4] But it may be designed for this purpose. Facebook wants to support accounts for childre under 13 and this could be a part of any future support.

[5] If you can't figure out why this might be a good idea for some children and adults you have much to learn.

[6] Yes, that's mine - but if you can see it then I have a problem :-).

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