The debate about whether or not Facebook’s privacy settings are private enough has been raging on since the website’s conception. With a community of 800 million strong active users and counting, keeping your stuff visible only to those you want it to be visible to can be a real challenge. Today I’m going to talk about how to protect your information from getting into the – dun dundunnn – wrong hands. Or at least how to better protect your privacy on the world’s largest social network.
You can remove yourself from Facebook search results – This is particularly important when you want to keep your profile away from prying eyes. For example, you head a large company and you don’t want your employees to see you’re on the site and digging around your business. Turning off public visibility is as easy as visiting the search privacy settings page and under “Search Visibility” selecting “Only Friends”.
Check Google – Another way a person can be found on Facebook is on Google. Enter that person’s name and voila, their Facebook page should appear, along with some limited information. To turn off this option, simply uncheck “Create a public search listing for me and submit it for search engine indexing” at the same page linked above.
Facebook’s tagging option is at once a bane and a blessing to many – Sure, it helps users locate that one photo they took on that one vacation in that one tropical paradise. On the flipside, at the very least, it can be (and has been) the cause of some minor personal embarrassment. Save yourself the trouble of late untagging and simply modify your setting at the profile privacy page to display your tagged photos only to you, or to a group of your friends with the Friends List option.
You might be using Facebook on an entirely professional level, but that doesn’t mean that your friends are doing the same – Prevent anything embarrassing or could be considered as spam from being posted to your Wall entirely by controlling who can post to it: on the Profile Privacy settings page exists a section labeled “Wall Posts”. From here you can choose who can post to your wall out of your bajillion friends, or disable posting from them entirely if that’s your thing.
Keep your contact information private, or limit it to close contacts – This last one is a no-brainer. You can do this right from your profile. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve heard about receiving emails and text messages from people they don’t know from Adam – it turns out that the person found a connection by way of former workplace, say, randomly added them on Facebook, and they made the mistake of confirming the relationship.
Finally, a few words to the wise: Facebook is meant as a tool for socialization, but that doesn’t mean you need to add every schmuck who happens to send you a friend request. Determine if you really know this person before hitting that confirm button, or run the risk of laying your information and personal photos to a total stranger. Some of those apps are shady and can cause embarrassment. Fortunately, most of them will ask if content is okay to be posted on your wall and published to your news feed, but more often than not, people are way too impatient to read the fine print on the confirmation message. Facebook’s privacy settings do what they can, but without the foresight of its users, all of the precautions in the world are useless. Protect yourself and save yourself the later migraine.
Later,
Andy
