5 Privacy Settings You Shouldn't Overlook

Participating in social networking using Facebook can be fun and useful.  And while it can also open an individual up to unnecessary exposure to others it doesn't have to.  If you have a teen on Facebook be sure to sit down with them and review their Privacy Settings and don't forget about your own.  While adults may not need the same level of privacy protection, often times it's what we'd prefer anyways.  Model for your kids how to protect yourself online, they learn best by what they see you do versus by what you tell them to do.  Anyone with a Facebook profile can control who sees their personal information by selecting a privacy level.  Most privacy levels are defined as viewable by:

• Everyone


• Friends of Friends


• Friends


• Only Me


• No One


• You can even customize some features to be viewed only by specific friends

To adjust your Facebook profile privacy settings start at the privacy settings page.  You can find this under the "Account" menu at the upper right-hand side of the page.  Click on "Privacy Settings".  If you then click on the "Customize Settings",  you can view all of the controllable privacy settings of your Facebook profile. For the safest setting choose the option to allow only friends to view all of the settings on the page.

There is a lot you can control, but be sure to set the following to a level you are comfortable with:

1. Personal information you share. Profile information includes such things as photos, interests, videos, friend list, and anything else you may include on a profile. Know that you can control who has access to the elements of the information you choose to share.  For instance each photo album can have a different level of privacy.  So you may share the family vacation photos with all of your friends, but another album you may choose share with a specific group of friends.


2. Personal information Other Share About or with You.  
It's one things when you post photos, but you don't need to allow just anyone to tag you in photos for others to see.  You can control if friends can see photos that other people tag you in.  In addition, teens like to post photos of themselves and their friends, definitely something you don't want a predator to see.  This is a setting you should teach your teen to use, or go in occasionally and do yourself.  Each photo has it's own tag so every time a photo is added, you can choose remove the tag or you can remove everyone's ability to view pictures you are tagged in if not your own.


3. Who Can See Contact Information? Information like your IM screen name, email address, website URL, address and phone number can also be controlled.  Personally, I think it's great to have it as an option, but I'm not sure it's necessary to reveal.  If a friend wants to contact you personally, they can always send a private message to you.  And to help to protect the privacy of your teen I recommend that this never be made public.


4. Who Can Find Your Profile by Doing a Search? Facebook's default setting allows your profile to be found using Facebook's search tool.  You can control people from finding your profile in the first place by changing this Facebook privacy setting.