Four Facebook Privacy Tips We’re Not Keeping Private

Are you mindful of your privacy when using social networking sites like Facebook?  Do you review and update your Facebook privacy settings on a regular basis?  If you answered no to both or either of these questions, you are not alone.

We just finished reading a piece on TheHuffingtonPost which reported on a survey recently released by Consumer Reports.  That survey showed that, “nearly 13 million U.S. Facebook users aren’t aware of the social network’s privacy control settings or simply don’t use them at all.”  We’re not sure how few users of social media in Australia understand Facebook privacy settings, but we’ll share a few tips for using privacy settings intelligently to help the cause.

Keep It Between Friends

One of the first things you should do is to limit what your share to your friends.  When you allow your photos, status updates and other posts to be seen by “friends of friends” you just don’t know who is seeing your posts.  Hopefully you don’t accept friend requests from total strangers.  So why would you want strangers seeing your personal photo collections?

Tag, You’re It

Let’s face it, we all have photos on our smartphones that we don’t want  our Facebook friends to see.  The problem is that we all have at least one friend who just has no filter when it comes to posting embarrassing pictures and then tagging us in those photos.  Make sure you turn on the Facebook’s tag review feature so you can stop these tags before they get you into any hot water.

Are You On the List

For those of you who co-mingle your social networks with work, you need to make sure you keep some things from making it to the water cooler.  To do this, you need to take advantage of Facebook’s listsforfriends.  This privacy tool allows you to choose what updates certain people can seen and also allows you to limit whether or not these friends can see items you are tagged in by friends.

Set LImits

One of the biggest privacy lapses for many people on Facebook is not reviewing permissions requested by applications.  Don’t blindly accept requests from your friends to use an application and don’t connect mobile applications to your Facebook account without first checking out what kind of information you are giving away.  Most of these applications allow you to minimize the personal information and permissions they need to function properly.  Always be wary of applications that don’t.

Care to Share

Do you have any tips for our readers?  If you don’t care to keep them private, please share them in the comments below.  Are you using Facebook for business?  Make sure to readthispost on how to protect your Facebook page.