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Facebook Privacy Settings
Ensuring your privacy is well protected when you use facebook is very very important. Most users assume that Facebook protects their information, and go ahead and post quite revealing and personal information and even photos of themselves, that they wouldn’t really like to be made available to the world at large.
The issue is even more important when children are involved. Most parents aren’t even checking what is going on with their kids on facebook, and in many cases, their kids are leaving themselves wide open for all sorts of abuse, from cyber bullying perpetrated by other kids, or attack by child predators that can easily locate the kids using the information on their Facebook profile.
Should I just delete my Facebook account?
No, I don’t believe you should. Facebook is a great way to stay in touch with more friends and family more often, and while I still think a good get together every so often is important in any relationship, I believe Facebook can be a great tool. If you are someone who just can’t be bothered logging in every so often to see whats going on, then by all means, delete your account. There is no point having it if you don’t want it, and you might as well take that final step.
If you decide this is for you, then after you have logged into facebook, visit the delete account page, and you can say goodbye to Facebook forever.
Where do I set my privacy settings?
UPDATE: Use this website; http://www.reclaimprivacy.org/facebook to check your privacy settings.
UPDATE: Good post from Mashable walking you through some common issues;
Take a look at the image I took from my own Facebook page; The account settings are currently at the top right of the page, and after you click, head down to PRIVACY SETTINGS.
You should go through all the different areas of facebook that are listed. There are quite a few, so this will take you a few minutes, but it’s well worth the trouble, as you will see that some of the settings are probably set to EVERYONE. You should change them all to a setting you are comfortable with; The default ones are;
- Everyone – The whole world will see it.
- Friends of Friends – Anyone your friends have made friends with on Facebook will see it. Do you know all of your friends friends? No, so this is almost as bad as “everyone”
- Friends – Only people you
- Customise – More on that next….
Can I have more control than that?
You sure can. One of the great features of Facebook is that it lets you group your Facebook friends, and once they are grouped together, you can set privacy settings for the group as well.
If you click on the FRIENDS link on the left side of your Facebook page, there will be a button at the top that says “CREATE A LIST”. Click that, and you can make a new list, and add specific friends to it. A good use of this would be to create a WORK list, and add your co-workers to the list. I have a “KIDS” list, so that all the younger people on my friends list can be separated out;
Then, when you go back to your privacy settings, you should choose the CUSTOMISE option. From here, you can go one of two ways;
First, you can choose friends (or groups of friends, if you have setup lists as we just talked about), and exclude them from seeing things the rest of your friends can see. Just add the list, or specific friends, to the “HIDE THIS FROM” list.
Alternatively, you can choose to set the main privacy to “SPECIFIC PEOPLE”, and then choose exactly which friends, or lists of friends, can see that part of your profile.
Using lists, rather than selecting specific people, makes organising this much easier; You just add new friends to the right list(s), and they automatically are restricted the way you want.
Facebook Photo Albums are tricky
You will want to check this from time to time, because Facebook sets your photo privacy separately for every photo album you have on Facebook. This can be a good thing, of course, because you can let everyone see your nice nature photography, but the drunken party pics of you in a nurses outfit can be restricted to your nearest and dearest friends only.
What about my kids Facebook use?
Personally, I don’t think kids younger than 16 should use Facebook at all. Most parents let their kids use facebook, however, so you will want to make sure your kids take some basic precautions. Here are the top tips I would suggest for your kids using facebook;
- Make sure ALL their privacy settings are set to FRIENDS ONLY
- Make sure they only “friend” people they have met in real life, and that the account really IS their friend.
- Make sure they NEVER “friend” a celebrity. Celebrities setup their Facebook PAGE, which is not the same as a user profile. You “LIKE” a page, and that’s fine. Where kids run into trouble is people setup fake profiles to get kids to “friend” them, and once they do, they can see all the kids personal information.
Further Reading (or watching)
- The Huffington Post have a good little video that will walk you through the top 5 important settings in a quick, 2 minute video.
- A nice video from Sophos going through the way the current privacy settings work.
- This guy has stuff he doesn’t want shared with anyone; I would suggest simply not putting that information into Facebook in the first place.
- Another video showing you through the privacy settings.
