I have been to several social networking sites and I tell you, it ain’t easy to be private in these sites! No matter how you try to keep some things private, they will still end up showing somewhere else. Worse, you don’t even have an idea who saw what and when, you don’t even know who browsed your account info!
Now that Facebook is as popular as ever – even the old lady at the baggage counter has one! – it is critical that I share some of the things you should do on your Facebook account in order to protect your privacy somehow. Every little thing you do counts when it comes to your safety and protection.
· List your friends according to groups. Ever heard of friend list? Don’t worry if not as not everyone is aware of this improvement. You can now list your friends according to group. Basically you have “family”, “friends”, and “professional” and each has their own privacy settings. This way you can set your account to share something in a group and not share to other groups you have. For example, you can post an office rant and not share it with your “professional” group – although I don’t really recommend doing that. Same way as you can “hide” info from a certain group and “show” other groups.
· Remove yourself from searches. This way you’ll prevent stalkers from finding you on Facebook. For your information, Facebook is a highly indexed site which means if your name is typed up on Google, there is a good chance your Facebook account will show on searches. Definitely you’ll come up when someone searches you over on Facebook search box too. By adjusting your settings, you can now remove yourself totally from both searches.
· Prevent tagged photos and videos from showing on your wall. This can get nasty and is quite embarrassing too. I’ve seen people lose their jobs and end relationships just because of a tagged photo or video. Facebook tagging is something you can’t control from the other end but you can definitely avoid its automatic publication on your wall by adjusting your settings.
· Make your albums private. While some of your photos may be safe enough to show the world, you just don’t know where it may end up. To be on the safer side of things, just make your albums visible to your friends and families only.
· Make your most personal information private, like the way it should be. Like your relationship status – I just don’t know why it has to be a really big deal when trying to set a relationship status in Facebook, complete with an icon at that. For me it’s like shouting to the world that “Hey, I’m single, hit me up!” or “Hey, I’m engaged! Jealous?” fortunately, you can now hide stories like this.
· Control posts. Avoid embarrassing and unexpected wall posts from your friends who just won’t grow up! Again, you can set this up to determine who can post on your wall and who cannot. Obviously, only allow people who have common sense to think before posting.
All these can be done on your privacy settings located at upper right hand corner along with “home” and “profile”. It is under “account”.