Life Imitates Art or Check Your Facebook Settings NOW!

Remember the song "Escape - The Pina Colada Song" by Rupert Holmes from the mid-1970s? You don't? I'm the only one who likes super-cheesy screwed up love songs from the 1970s? Oh, okay. You don't have to admit it.

Anyway, if you honestly don't remember or you weren't born then, let me refresh your memory. "Escape - The Pina Colada Song" is about a man who is bored in his marriage. Sitting in bed one night, he opens up the paper to the personals (These were in the Classifieds section of the newspaper, for all you young whippersnappers, and were the 1970s version of Match.com.) and found an ad that piqued his interest. The woman sounded perfect. She was everything that was missing from his marriage. He wrote a letter to the woman and set up a date to meet her at a bar. When he walked in to the bar, sitting on a barstool was his wife. Needless to say, it brought some magic back into their marriage, which is more than I would think would happen in real life, which it kind of did . . .

Fast forward to 2009. A husband and wife are both registered on Facebook and one day the husband opens up his Facebook account to see a sidebar ad for "Hot Singles Near You!" The picture in the ad? His wife. Oops.

Now this isn't a story about a wife (or husband) looking for love in all the wrong places (yep, I'm gonna squeeze in every single cheesy 1970s song reference I can!). It's actually a story about Facebook privacy settings. Check yours. You may be unwittingly allowing Facebook to use your picture in their ads, like the wife in this story. She had failed to pay attention to her Facebook settings and allowed Facebook to use pictures of her in their ads that were shown to her friends.

Personally, I don't want Facebook to do that with my pictures. I don't want to be endorsing things I'm not really endorsing. So I've opted-out of all Facebook ads and so should you. I mean, what if that happened to you and your boss saw it? It's probably not the message you want to send, even mistakenly. It's simple really. Just 6 short steps.

How to opt-out of Facebook ads:

1. Click Settings at the top right of your screen;
2. Choose Privacy;
3. Select News Feed and Wall;
4. Then Facebook Ads;
5. Almost done when you check Appearance in Facebook Ads;
6. Finally choose No one.

Fortunately, in this real life scenario, both the husband and wife had a decent sense of humor. It could have turned out badly.