One of the beautiful things about Facebook is that it offers a level of privacy that many of the other social networking sites do not. However, you have to go to your privacy settings and adjust them to fit your desired level of privacy. The following is a look at ten must have privacy settings for Facebook, and which section of your settings they are found under:
Profile Settings
1. Who can view your profile is perhaps the most important privacy setting for Facebook users. It gives you four options regarding who may view your profile: everyone, your friends, friends of your friends or you may customize it. For most people, the best choice is to allow your friends to view your profile. As Facebook grows, if you’re allowing everyone to see your profile, literally millions of people can see your profile, which is probably not a good idea today.
2. Who can see your personal information is second only to who can view your profile on the list of important privacy settings. Personal information includes whatever you choose to add about your life, including your likes and dislikes. Again, as millions of people, many with less than honorable intentions, use Facebook, it is probably best to limit personal information to your friends’ eyes only.
3. Who can see your contact information is considered by most people to be sensitive information. When you create a Facebook profile you put in contact information including IM Screen names, mobile phone number, home phone number, address, website and email address. Sensitive information, if for no other reason than safety, should be viewable by friends only.
Search Settings
4. Who is allowed to search for you, or your search visibility. Do you want people to be able to put in your name and find you? Or do you want to find them? When you’ve answered this question for yourself, adjust this setting accordingly.
5. What people see when they search for you is up to you. When someone looks you up they will only see the information you make visible to everyone. Whether someone looking you up sees your photos, friends list or what pages you like is entirely up to you as is whether they are able to message you or add you as a friend.
6. Are your search results available outside of Facebook, on public search listings? In other words, if someone looks you up on Google, can they see your Facebook page? Change this setting to protect your information.
News Feed and Wall
7. What shows up in other people’s news feeds about your activity. Do you want their home page news feed to show your comments on notes? What about photos, videos, links and relationship changes?
8. What recent activity shows up on the home page. Do you want people to see when you add friends or remove or change information? Whether you want people to see your recent activity is entirely up to you just make sure you change your privacy settings accordingly.
9. Third party Facebook ads. Do you want third party applications and ads to use your name, show your information to your friends or do you want it accessible to no one? No one is the best option here!
Applications
10. Third party applications can see what is in your public search listing, meaning your name, networks, profile picture and friends list. Change your privacy settings to limit what information about you third party applications are able to access.
