Secure Your Facebook

5 Things You Should Do To Maintain Privacy on Facebook

According to various reports, teens and adults are being turned down for work due to certain things they’ve posted on their social profiles. To see how potentially embarrassing indiscriminate posting can be, visit weknowwhatyouredoing.com.Younger children are at risk, too, given the growing number of underage Facebook users. According to figures by the Crimes Against Children Research Center, children in the 10-13 age range are at most risk from online predators — that age group makes for 22% of targets.Here are some tips for maintaining your privacy and keeping your profile socially acceptable, as well as for protecting your children if they use Facebook.

Review your Facebook profile information to make sure that if you do have email addresses, employment history and phone numbers listed, that the information is only accessible by friends. Keep in mind that Facebook had a bug in June 2013 that caused the leak of email addresses and/or phone numbers of 6M users — not a large percentage of all users, but enough to potentially cause problems for those compromised. (If you have specific need to prevent someone from finding you, use an alias in your profile — and don’t post any photos of people associated with you. Better still, use a social media service that’s truly private.)

Create friend lists. Name them according to social circles such as family, friends, friends of friends, colleagues, college-chums, teammates, etc. Put everyone in your network on one or more lists. Every time you add someone, assign them to one or more lists. Hide your friend lists to protect your friends, so that strangers cannot see to whom you are connected.

When you post, use friend lists to control who sees your information. Set a default setting (e.g., Friends or Friends of Friends). If you want, you can change the viewability setting for a specific post either before (best practice) or after posting.

Pay careful attention not only to what you are revealing about yourself in something you are about to post, but also look at the icon indicating who can see the post once it’s published. If you see a “globe” icon, that means your post will be public. Make a habit of checking this before posting.

Review your recent posts and consider removing personal details in case you’ve over-shared.

Make sure that your location is not being broadcast. This is especially important if you’re using Facebook on a mobile device. Turn off the location feature.

If you use Facebook for work purposes, split your posts between your personal profile only available to friends and a “Personality/ Business” Page accessible publicly.

Review your friends’ posts if they tag you. Review your comments on friends posts that might be controversial, in case they change their post’s status to Public. Cover your bases by using Google Alerts [http://www.google.com/alerts] to get email updates for your Facebook profile name, and then take action if necessary.

Even if you keep your Facebook profile private, if you are using Facebook on a mobile device, be absolutely sure that you are using legitimate wi-fi networks and not “honey pots”. If you get on such a network by accident, change your password immediately. If your Facebook profile includes your email address, change your email password.

Change your password regularly — once a month or more often — and don’t repeat any previous password for at least a few months — preferably never.

Use different passwords for different websites and services. Try not to reuse your Facebook password anywhere else — especially for email addresses listed in your Facebook profile.

Pay attention to any privacy setting changes that Facebook announces. You never know when they will affect you or your children.

Make sure your profile name is unique. If there are other people with the same name as you, don’t take chances that your profiles might be confused by someone.

Check your overall privacy settings on the Facebook Privacy Settings and Tools web page [https://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy].

Check the settings on your photo albums. Each album and photo can have custom settings.

Check the Facebook Privacy page [https://www.facebook.com/help/445588775451827] for more details on privacy settings.