Privacy is important and, if you adjust your account settings to your level of comfort, you can protect your Facebook account privacy. You can allow as many or as few people as you like to access your information. Let’s take a look at ten important privacy settings and the reasons why you should be making adjustments to your privacy settings.
10 Must-Have Facebook Privacy Settings
1. Profile Settings. Adjust your privacy level under ‘Profile Settings’ so that “Only friends” may see your profile. This is important in order to protect the information in your profile such as photos and other personal information.
2. Profile Settings. Set the ‘Basic and Personal Information Settings’ to “Only friends” which is second only to “Only Me” on the privacy scale. It provides a lot more protection than the “Networks” and “Everyone” options which are poor options because they expose sensitive information like methods of contacting you, your likes and dislikes as well as your marital status, political status and religious views to everybody.
3. Search Settings. Adjust your search visibility to fit your privacy needs. Do you want anyone to be able to look you up on Facebook or do you want only friends of friends, for example, to be able to find you? The security threat here is much lower so adjust this setting to your comfort level.
4. Search Settings. Determine which features you want people to be able to see when they look you up on Facebook. You can determine this by checking boxes next to the items you want to be visible to a person when they find you in a search. You may allow people to see your photo, friends list, a link for messaging you, a link for adding you as a friend and what pages you are a fan of.
5. Search Settings. Do you want your Facebook profile and information to be searchable outside of Facebook, on Google, for example? If you do not want people not on Facebook to be able to see your information, check the box accordingly.
6. News Feeds and Your Wall. Using the checkmark boxes, determine which pieces of information, your comments on other people’s posts for example, you want showing up in your friends’ news feeds on their home page.
7. News Feeds and Your Wall. Go into the privacy settings for your News Feeds and Wall to adjust what recent activity shows up in your wall. If someone were to Facebook stalk you, and this does happen, they could review your recent activities and visit other people’s pages and photos to look at your comments. A person can see what you’re saying, figure out where you are and will be. Ask yourself whether you want people to see when you add friends or change information, for example?
8. Facebook ads. Facebook has recently changed a variety of policies and several of them involve advertising. Where advertising is concerned, Facebook can put your name into ads and put those ads on your friends’ walls saying that you recommend a person, place or thing. If you do not want this to happen, go to your Privacy settings, and indicate, by selecting “No one” from the drop down menu, that you do not want third party applications and ads to use your name, or show your information to your friends.
9. Public search listing privacy. Set this as high as third party applications on Facebook so that, by default, no one can see what is in your public search listing.
10. Go to your settings and use the Block feature for anyone who you know specifically you do not want them to have access to your information. If you block someone, they will not be able to find you in a Facebook search, see your profile, or interact with you through Facebook channels like wall postings. It is a good way to protect yourself from specific people.
