It’s hard to keep your private life and your Internet life separate. With social networking sites asking for your hometown, phone number, and date of birth, it’s hard to be sure who can see that information. The best advice is to never post personal data you don’t want everyone in the world to see. Even if you think you’re only friends with 200 people on Facebook, that doesn’t mean no one else can visit your page and gather facts about you.
To aid in user security, Facebook includes a number of privacy settings that can be customized to your liking. This article will explain some of the more important settings to adjust for maintaining privacy online.
- Search results: The privacy setting for being found with the search bar is completely adjustable. If you would rather people not be able to find you, you can change your settings so that if your name is searched for, your page will not be included among the results. You can also manage the search privacy by network, friend list, etc.
- Photo tagging: If you’d rather your mother or employer didn’t see embarrassing and inappropriate photos of you on the Internet — that you didn’t post — there’s an option to regulate who can and cannot see your tagged photos. You can change it so only you can see them, only your close friends can see them, etc.
- Album privacy: Uploading an album or note doesn’t mean the whole Internet gets to view them. You can restrict the people who can see your posted items on an individual or universal basis.
- Contact information: If you don’t mind Facebook browsers checking out your page but you don’t particularly care for them knowing where you live and how to reach you, you can limit who sees your contact information.
- Story publishing: Not everyone needs to see when you’ve ended a relationship!