1. Organize Friends in Lists
What do you do when your boss, mother-in-law, or a casual web acquaintance
sends you a friend request on Facebook? Use Friend Lists. Friend Lists are the
foundation of your Facebook privacy settings. Select Friends from the top menu,
and use the Create link to create friend lists like Co-workers, Family, College
Friends, etc. Your friends can’t see your lists, so you can name them whatever
you like.
Tip: On your left sidebar, all your friend lists may not show up by
default. Click More to see all of them, and drag and drop those you want above
the separator.
2. Customize Profile Privacy
Click Settings > Privacy Settings > Profile. Select which parts
of your profile will be seen by whom.
If you choose Customize in the drop down, you can be more specific. This is
where the Friend Lists you created before become really useful.
Also go to the Contact Information tab and choose how you want your contact
information to be shared on the Internet.
3. Set Facebook Privacy Level of Photo Albums
On the Photos tab of your profile page, click Album Privacy. Here again, you can use your Friend Lists to set the privacy for each photo album.
Note that your profile pictures go into a special album that is always visible to ALL
your friends.
4. Restrict Search Visibility
Click Privacy > Search to set your visibility when someone searches
Facebook for people. This is an important way to safeguard your Facebook
privacy. You can also select what will be visible in the search results.
5. Control Automatic Wall Posts and News Feed Updates
Your
actions in Facebook such as comments, likes, appear as highlights on ALL your
friends’ home pages. You cannot use friend lists here, only turn them on or off.
Go to Privacy > News Feed and Wall and choose whether you want your boss
or ex-girlfriend to know that you’re in a relationship.
6. Set Facebook Wall Privacy
Go to your profile page, click Options > Settings under the status box.
Here you can control whether your friends can post to your Wall, and
who can see the posts made by your friends.
7. Avoid Appearing in Advertisements
Facebook has two types of advertisements: third-party and Facebook. Third-party advertisements are currently not allowed to use your pictures, but there is a setting to disallow it if it is allowed in the future.
Go to Privacy > News Feed and Wall > Facebook Ads tab to turn this off.
The Facebook ads shown to your friends are about ‘social actions’ like
becoming a fan of something. You can turn this off at the bottom of the page.
8. Protect Yourself from Friends’ Applications
Go to Privacy > Applications, and click the Settings tab and uncheck all the boxes. These settings control what information about you is visible to applications installed
by your friends. By default, these are set to visible. This means that your
religious, sexual, and political preferences, pictures, etc. are readily
available to one of the million worldwide Facebook application developers, each
time any of your friends takes a quiz, plays a game, or runs any other Facebook
app. This is obviously a Facebook privacy issue.
This is the most commonly misunderstood aspect of Facebook privacy. These settings control what applications installed by your friends can see about you, even if you don’t install the application yourself.
Why is this important? Because these settings will not change anything about
what you are sharing with the applications you install yourself. For that, go to
the next step.
9. Privacy from Your Applications
There is no way to control what applications see about you; it is an
all-or-nothing affair. Take this quiz developed by the American
Civil Liberties Union to check what anonymous application developers can
know about you and your friends each time you take a quiz.
The Burton Group’s Identity Blog features the Facebook Privacy Mirror, an
application that you can use to find out what applications know about you and
your friends. If you really want to see exactly what profile data of each of
your friends is visible to application developers, Privacy Mirror shows it in
detail.
The only thing you can do is to authorize only those applications you
require and trust. Go to Settings > Application Settings from the top menu.
Change the drop-down from Recently Used to Authorized. Here you can see all the
applications you have authorized to get access to ALL your profile information.
Remove the ones you no longer need.
Also check the list of applications Allowed to Post and Granted Additional
Permissions to remove unwanted ones.
10. Quitting Facebook? Delete, Don’t Just De-Activate Your Account
You can easily deactivate your account in Facebook from the Settings page.
But deactivation will retain all your profile information within Facebook,
including pictures, friends, etc. If you want to permanently delete your
Facebook account, click here to submit a deletion request. Note that:
There is an unspecified delay between submitting your delete request and actual deletion. If you login to Facebook, your deletion request is automatically cancelled.
There doesn’t seem to be any way to confirm that your request was completed.
Even after permanent deletion, Facebook says that copies of your photos may remain on their servers for technical reasons.
Also, note that once in a while, there is news of a Facebook hack or leak that can
expose your information on the Internet. It is better to be safe than sorry by
avoiding using Facebook for anything that may embarrass you.
Hopefully some of this information can help you. I know there were a couple of things on this list that I wasn’t aware of. Facebook has many features and these are a some we thought were well worth mentioning. If you have the opportunity to sit down with your kids and do some of these safety precautions, this along with installing
, can ease your mind with what your children are doing online. What are your thoughts?
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