Social Media Platforms: Facebook - Part II

Facebook - Part 2

Privacy Settings

One of the most important things to consider when using a social network like Facebook is your privacy, especially for your personal profile. If you are accepting friend requests from people you do not know, or have some of your privacy settings set incorrectly, you may disclose personal information that you had no intention of sharing. To help address this, Facebook allows you to control almost everything that friends and others can see about you.
To access Facebook’s privacy settings, click on “Account” on the top right corner of Facebook. From there, you should see a link to “Privacy Settings.” Make sure that you take the time to go through these settings when you first create a personal profile.

A few tips on privacy:

• If someone is harassing you on Facebook, you have the ability to block that person from interacting with you. This is a quick and easy way to prevent someone from contacting you through Facebook.
• Quite a few of Facebook’s default privacy settings allow for more public visibility than you may be comfortable with. For example, anyone on Facebook is allowed to view your profile picture photo album by default. This is why it is so important to carefully review each section within “Privacy Settings” after you create a personal profile.
• Facebook allows search engines like Google to access and display publicly available information within their search results. This may be good for your public visibility, or it may be publicly disclosing more information than you are comfortable with. To see what may potentially be displayed, click on the “Preview” to see what the public can see.
• Applications that you install (i.e. games, quizzes, tools) all have their own privacy settings. Go through each application’s privacy settings after you install it to make sure everything checks out.
• There are definitely other settings that relate to privacy that may not be in the “Privacy Settings” link. Check out the “Account Settings” and “Application Settings” as well, after you create a profile or install a new app.