Facebook Privacy Settings Part 1

In this post, I’m going to cover some of the basics for understanding your Facebook Privacy settings. An article in the NY Times recently showed an amazing graphic depicting the complexities of Facebook’s privacy settings. Understanding how to navigate your privacy settings in Facebook these days is crucial because it will help you be aware of what information you are sharing and who has access to that information. Granted there are those who are okay with sharing all of their information with anyone who happens across their profile and that’s okay. However, there may also be users who wish to keep personal entirely separate from professional or users who want to limit who has access to their information (such as future employers).  The single most important thing to keep in mind when using Facebook or any other Internet platform regardless of how tight you set your privacy settings is this:

IF YOU DON’T WANT ANYONE TO SEE IT OR KNOW ABOUT IT, DO NOT PUT IT ON THE INTERNET.

Keep in mind with Facebook, that there is some information about you from your personal profile that BY DEFAULT are public and you cannot change that. The information which remains public includes your name, your profile picture, your gender, your current city, network, your friend list and your Pages. This information is accessible by applications you use or from websites you connect with from Facebook.

Okay, now that we have that out of the way, let’s cover the first set of Privacy settings in your account. To find the privacy settings, click on “Account” in the upper right hand corner and select “Privacy Settings.” The first set of options to come up are the settings for “Personal Information and Posts” which will look something like this:

Facebook defines these settings as:

Profile Information refers to the visibility of fields you fill out in your profile. Select who can see each type of profile content from each corresponding drop-down menu. If you choose the “Customize” option for any content type, you can hide content from specific friends or Friend lists.

Each of these sections are for different pieces of your profile. You have four different options in setting the level of privacy for each section. The first setting (which is often the default setting) is “Everyone”- which means just that. Keep in mind that Everyone isn’t just everyone in Facebook, it’s everyone on the Internet and that includes people or applications that are mining for data about you for marketing or advertising research. My advice to anyone using Facebook is to carefully consider how or if you use the “Everyone” setting. The next setting is “Friends of Friends.” This is also a rather broad setting that has the potential to give hundreds or thousands more people access to your information or profile. Consider if you have 200 friends and they each have 200 friends, if you use the Friends of Friends setting then you are enabling access to your profile to 40,000 people.  If you are looking to keep mom or dad locked out of your profile but you let your aunt or cousin be a friend, then if the aunt or cousin is friends with mom or dad, then they now have access to your information via the mutual friend.

The next two settings are much more restrictive. There is the “Only Friends” options and then there is the “Custom” option. The “Only Friends” option is pretty straightforward restricts information to just your friends- that is, those people from whom you have accepted a friend request.  The “Custom” option provides for some additional levels of customizing who can see information. These include an “Only Me” option, the option to allow only specific people to see a piece of information or an “Only Friends- except for these people” option.  While it can be cumbersome to have to wade through and create lists of who can see what, they can be extremely helpful options to use in managing your account.

For example, let’s say you have accepted a friend request from your boss but you are also friends with other employees in your company. Perhaps you have that one friend/co-worker who is prone to posting your Wall about all the things he hates about work or complains about work frequently. You might then consider restricting the Post by Friends setting to only friends EXCEPT for your boss. This keeps your boss from seeing your co-worker’s posts on your Wall which might make your boss think you agree with this co-worker.

As you can see from the screenshot above, you can set the privacy for several different areas of your profile. I usually recommend setting your date of birth to “Only Me” since this is a sensitive piece of information that should be strictly controlled to help avoid problems such as identity theft.

For Photo Albums, you have the option to set different privacy settings for each photo album. I’ve used this before if I wanted to post a photo from the past but only wanted specific friends to have access to seeing it. Since I have a tendency to keep my personal profile separate from unknown business contacts, then I’ve generally set these to “Only Friends.” If you use your profile more for business and tend to post business related photos such as from conferences or events, then you may be more inclined to open up certain photo albums to Everyone or to Friends of Friends.

Once you’ve chosen all of your privacy settings for profile information and posts, then you can click on “Preview My Profile” to see how your profile appears either to the general public or you can type in a specific person’s name to see how that friend sees your profile and what information they can access.

In Part 2 of Facebook Privacy Settings, I’ll cover the settings for Contact Information and Friends, Tags and Connections. What questions do you have about these privacy settings and Facebook?

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Tags: Facebook Privacy, Personal Profile, privacy settings

Category: Facebook Security