A coworker of mine recently expressed concern over privacy on Facebook. I found it surprising that she lets her kids use Twitter, which has virtually no privacy, but not Facebook. After thinking about it some more, I can now understand why. It’s all about expectations when you start using a new social network. On Twitter, you’re expected to provide very little about yourself — name, picture, location, website and short bio. Many don’t even reveal their true identity.
Facebook, on the other hand, is largely driven by peer pressure. Pressure to post lots of personal information, phone numbers, pictures, etc. Friends old and new want to find you and learn more about your life. Therefore, even though Facebook has great privacy controls, protecting yourself and your family can be a little scary without following a couple quick tips.
- Create friend lists: Segment your friends into different groups to control who sees what. Sometimes you have befriended people to be nice, but it doesn’t mean you want them to see everything about you. The easiest way to get started is to go to Friends, click Create New List and name the list “Limited”. Then go through your friends and add people to the new list you just created . Lists double as great organizational tools, so start using them right away!
- Change the default privacy settings: By default, everyone in your network can see your profile information and pictures. Your network is generally a city or university, so we’re talking about thousands of people that you don’t know getting access to your profile. That’s pretty scary. To fix that, navigate to Settings / Privacy / Profile. Change all the drop downs to Only Friends and hit Save Changes. Next, put your “Limited” list to work. Let’s say, for example, you don’t want people on that list to see Pictures Tagged of You. Scroll down to that category, choose Customize from the drop down menu and type Limited in the “Except These People” section. After you click Okay and then Save Changes, you’ll see the results of your privacy tweaking. This is just scratching the surface of what you can do with Facebook’s privacy settings and lists. Play around with it and customize it to your liking.
This is by no means all you can do to protect yourself on Facebook. Friend lists and custom privacy settings are the foundation and are present throughout the Facebook site. Start with these and I will go into some more tips in a future post. Post your experience with Facebook privacy in the comments section.
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