Nora Brown Design

Control Your Privacy on Facebook

I recently came across an interesting nytimes.com article about Facebook’s privacy policies and settings. I know a lot of my clients are using Facebook for themselves or their business, so I thought it would be good to remind everyone to take a look at some of their Facebook settings, and make sure they are in line with what you want.

Privacy Settings

When you log in to Facebook, in the upper right there is a Settings pulldown menu; if you select Privacy Settings you will be taken to a menu of most of the possible Privacy Settings you can control. Each of these in turn leads to a menu of actual settings. I recommend going through each page and checking out your settings—it only takes a moment. For each you have the option of sharing with:

• Everyone
• Friends of Friends
• Only Friends
• actually excluding specific people

Profile Information

Note that the “Posts by Me” under “Profile Information” includes everything you post—Status Updates, Photos, etc.

Search

The Search setting is another important one to look at. It controls what information from your Facebook account is visible to search engines such as Google. Whether you choose to allow this or not will depend on what you share on Facebook, and what you’re using Facebook for in the first place.

Test it out

Once you’ve adjusted your settings, in the upper right there is a button that says “Preview my Profile”. Click on this, and you will see what information is visible to the Facebook public. If you type a name (that of one of your friends, for example) in the box at the top, you can see how your profile looks ot that person.

You may also want to do a quick Google search for yourself and see if any Facebook information comes up.