Facebook Privacy Settings

Facebook privacy is a big issue to everyone, a lot of us do not know how to set our Facebook privacy settings properly. As a result of that, we reveal a lot of information unwillingly to strangers or people whom we do not know very well. In this article, I am going to show you how to secure your Facebook so that only specific people will be able to see what you want them to see.

Create friends “lists”

Just in case you think that Google + has “circles”, facebook has this thing called “friends lists”. Creating friends lists allows you to sort your friends out into various “types” of friends, like collegues, school friends and also friends that you add when you play facebook games. Sometimes you may not want your boss to find out that you are chatting while you are on the job, you may also not want friends that you add just for games to know too much about your private life. This is where lists comes in, sorting them out into the various lists will allow you to block them. I will show you how to do this later on in this guide. Besides, sorting them out into lists is also very helpful, in any event you do not play a certain game anymore, you can simply pull up the list and delete every single friend off from that list.

 

 

Click on “Home” which is on the top right of the Facebook page followed by the “Friends” link at the left hand side of the Facebook page. Now you can click on the “Edit Friends” link which will now appear on the top right of the page. If you have not create any lists before, you will only be able to select, create a list, if you have already created some friends lists before, you will need to click on “Manage Friend List”

 

You can key in anything that describes this bunch of friends you wish to categorize them into. You are also able to create as many lists as you like and add more in future. All these lists will appear at the left portion of the Facebook page. To sort your friends out into those lists, simply click on the “Friends not on a list” to list them all and add them to the list of your choice.

 

Set your Facebook privacy settings

 

You can set specific facebook settings to limit content that can be viewed to the public and even to certain people. I recommended everyone to go through this settings and implement some form of security. While it is sort of troublesome to do it, it is a set and you can forget about it.

 

Click on the “Accounts” menu at the top right of the page followed by “Privacy Preferences”.  You will get a page that briefly explains what account privacy is all about.  At the lower portion of the page, you will get 5 options for you to set.  If you want a more customized approach, click on the “Try editing your profile” in the first paragraph for more advance settings.

 

Notice that there is at least 3 presets you can choose from. Everyone, Friends of Friends and Friends only. If you want only those friends that you have specifically added to see what you post, choose “Friends Only”

If you chose “Friends of Friends”, it means that your photos or comments or anything that you post can be viewed by other people who may be friends with your “friend”, but not friends with you yet. Put it simply, it means that you tell your friend something about yourself, and your friend can spread it to his other friends.

The everyone settings is obvious enough, you don’t need me to explain this, don’t you?

But I suggest clicking on the “Try editing your profile” option. You will see a whole list of information that is on your profile. There is a button at the end of every information bar for you to change the preference to limit the types of people you wish to allow.  The “custom” option will allow you to  insert names of who you wish to hide or block this information from. You can key in the entire list which you have created earlier. You can also insert multiple lists to block from even more people.

Any friends that you have added later on in future will also be restricted from any personal information based on the list you which to classify them into. You can easily check how your profile actually looks like to strangers by clicking on the “Preview My Profile” button at the top of the privacy settings page.

 

Facebook gaming in private

 

The newly updated Facebook has a real stupid feature which is somewhere just below the menu. The place where you will click on “Home” , “Profile” and etc. It shows the world what you are doing and that is playing games. Can you imagine revealing what you are doing to your boss? You have a choice to game in stealth so that no body will know that you are actually gaming.

 

You can hover your mouse over one of the game icons on the top and select “Edit Applications”. Similarly, you can set the same amount of restrictions so that the world cannot see what you are doing. Change it to “Only Me” and you can game as much as you like without letting your boss know.

I hope all these tips on how to set your Facebook privacy settings are useful and easy for all users to understand and follow.