With the increasing number of people from all different backgrounds on Facebook and the increasing openness of the site, protecting your privacy has become more important than ever. Users never know who is checking their profile: a client, prospective employer, current employer, friend, or competitor. Do you want any two of those groups seeing the same things on your profile? For example, you wouldn’t want a prospective employer or client to know what your friend from high school had to say or looking at the photos from that wedding this weekend.
Here are a few tips for protecting your privacy on Facebook:
- Control how those whom you don’t know see your profile. Facebook has a public profile feature—use it. You should control what people see when they search for you, either through Facebook or what shows up from Facebook in the search engines (such as Google). Your public profile will most likely include: your profile picture, some of your friends, and some of the pages you are a fan of.
- Segment your friends. As more people join the social networking site, you are most likely to have business and personal connections on Facebook. The site now allows you to segment your friends into different groups and control what each group sees on your profile. This is the simplest way to manage what content is seen by whom, so instead of deleting that questionable wall post from your high school friend, you can ensure that only your friends will see it. Segmenting your friends is also a time saver. If you are looking for one of your business contacts, just quickly search that group, and it can prevent you from having to chat with people you would rather not chat with. Lists have no limits; you can have as many as you think necessary, and you can add as many people to each list as you want.
- Choose privacy settings for different features. Photos, videos, wall posts, etc., all have their own settings. Once you have segmented your friends, go through each feature and confirm who you want and don’t want to see them. For instance, you can choose to have all of your friends view your photos but exempt your “work” or “professional” list. When building your privacy settings, consider the possibilities of who could end up on each list and what would be appropriate or inappropriate for those groups to see.
- Select what types of newsfeed stories people see about you. Yes, if you change something on your profile, people can figure it out, but you don’t want a story showing up on everyone’s homepage every time you change something. You can control exactly which types of updates are published.
Facebook is a place where you should be able to show some personality. No one is suggesting that you completely remove all of yourself or hide all of your personality from certain people on Facebook. The important thing about privacy settings is that you are aware of what you have them set to, and you are comfortable with the amount of information you are sharing and who is able to see that information. Like most social sites, there is a balance on Facebook, and finding that balance depends on who your friends or followers are and how much you are willing to share with them.