It's 2018 and BariatricPal is going to be a bit more social this year! We're planning to launch an Official BariatricPal Facebook Group later this week.

The big question we have: Should we keep the Facebook group completely Secret or just Private?

Not sure what the difference between secret and private is. I just believe it needs to be a safe non judgmental site.

May want to keep it secret since there are some people that don't tell family and friends that they have had WLS.

21 minutes ago, kjnelson said:

Not sure what the difference between secret and private is. I just believe it needs to be a safe non judgmental site.

Closed and secret Facebook groups seem like they should be fairly similar. The difference is that closed groups can be seen by the public, while secret groups can't. If you create a closed group, the name of it, its members, and its description can be seen by the public—basically everything but the posts in the group.

The benefit of having a closed group is that anyone can find us. If it’s secret, members can only find us by invitation. We’re leaning towards keeping it secret.

I like the idea of a secret page. I see all the bariatric pages on Fb but i dont want my fb friends knowing i had this surgery, so i cant join.

Secret - not everyone wants acquaintances to know there private medical business

I am not even sure I want FB knowing my business.

1 hour ago, Stella S said:

I am not even sure I want FB knowing my business.

FaceBook is insidious ... its data collection, its ads, its prying. Grrrr!

26 minutes ago, Rainbow_Warrior said:

FaceBook is insidious ... its data collection, its ads, its prying. Grrrr!

I completely understand how you feel. We're not forcing anyone to be part of it!

24 minutes ago, Alex Brecher said:

We're not forcing anyone to be part of it!

I gathered that, Alec.

I'm just so surprised that people who say they fear governments and government departments will willy-nilly FREELY hand over their personal information to FACEBOOK, GOOGLE, etc.

They then lament the targeted ads and fake recommendations.

I live with Ad Block Plus, a search engine that is NOT Google or Bing and a high security threshold.

I do have FB but it's a limited relationship.

I think groups are better served being set to private. There are a lot of things I belong to that have a public Facebook page for posting articles and such, but then a private group geared more for personal questions that people can ask. Personally I don't feel there is any secrecy or true anonymity to be had if you're on Facebook. You have to go in knowing there's always a chance somebody is going to find out. All somebody has to do is join the private group and they have access to all the member names in there.

Don’t get me wrong – I think the idea of a Facebook group is a great idea. People just need to be well aware that there’s a world of difference between Facebook at the BP forum.