Staying private on facebook

Many people put off joining facebook because they worry that once they join their information will be visible to the entire world. This is a legitimate concern as more and more people (especially employers) are using facebook to do background checks and see what people are up to. It’s understandable that people don’t want details of their social life on show for everyone to see.

This article is designed to show you how you can use the excellent privacy features built into facebook to restrict the information your facebook account displays so you are back in control of your online facebook identity.

This article is broken down into a few stages as there is a fair bit to cover, so click a link below to jump straight to an area that interests you or just start reading from the top.

• Choose your friends wisely
• First things first
• Hide from the search engines
• Control your private information
• Photo album

Choose your friends wisely

Probably the most important step to ensuring your online privacy on facebook is to restrict who you allow to become your friend. facebook works primarily by allowing people to ‘find you’ and then request to be your friend. Once you have accepted them, with default privacy settings enabled, they are able to view your photos, write on your wall and more. People can only become your friend once you confirm their request so this lets you control who can see more detailed information about you.

It sounds bad, but the best way to make sure people can’t access that much information about you is to simply ignore their friend requests. It’s ok - they won’t be told that you ignored them. The request just drops off the radar, and, hopefully, they won’t send it again. If you wouldn’t normally share that sort of information with them in the real world, why would you share it online?

First things first

When you sign up for a facebook account by default most of your information is shared with your friends. This includes stuff like your birthday, email address as well as any other information you decide to feed into facebook during the sign up process. Remember, facebook only knows what you tell it, so if you don’t want it to know something, don’t put it in - Simple.

Hide from the search engines

The first thing you want to do in order to keep your information off the wider internet outside of facebook is to disable the ability for people to find your facebook profile using search engines like Google or Yahoo.

Turning off your Public Search Listing is easy. Sign into your facebook account and then mouse over Settings in the top right corner and select Privacy Settings from the drop down list.

Click on the link to Search.

Now, un-check the checkbox for Public Search Listing. There are a few other options on this page which you may want to consider deactivating. Remember that people still need to be able to find you if they are to request to be your friend. Once you’re done remember to press Save Changes to apply the settings.

Control your private information

The next step to limiting who can see what on your facebook profile is to return to the Privacy Settings page and click the Profile link.

On the profile page you will see lots of options which allow you to control who can see the different parts of your facebook account. The information is broken down to give you a granular level of control. You can find out what information is included in each category by clicking on the small grey question mark on the right of each entry.

Most items give you three levels of privacy

• Friends of Friends
• Only Friends
• Customise...

Friends of Friends and Only Friends are self-explanatory and are used by most people. Only Friends is probably a good setting for all of these options, however if you want more control the Customise... option allows you to include or exclude specific people from your friends list. This is a great way, for example, of excluding work colleagues or including just a few of your closest friends.

Photo albums

Each photo album you create lets you specify who is allowed to view it. Each time you create a new photo album you will be given the option shown below which allows you to specify whether your photos are fit for general consumption or whether only a few select people can view photos of your latest big night on the town.

If you’re just getting started on facebook chances are that lots of your friends might not be part of the club yet either so if you want to share photos with them there is a great Share feature built into each photo album. To use it, open your photo album; click the Share button in the bottom right corner and type in your friends email address. They will be sent a link which only allows them to access the album you have chosen.

Good luck!