Facebook has 350 million users, half of whom log in at least once per day. Do you know want all those people to see all of your personal information? Here is a quick guide to understanding privacy on Facebook and the five privacy settings you should know about:
1) Friend Lists
These can be a little time consuming to set up a first time around, but they do help you have some control over who views certain content on your profile and make things easier potentially in the long run. Navigate to your friends page and you'll see an option to create friend lists. Maybe setting up Family, Friends and Co-Workers is a way to go, but whatever you do, friend lists are a very helpful tool that Facebook offers its users.
2) Tagged Photos and Videos
Go to your privacy settings page (Settings and then Privacy Settings) and you can enter a custom privacy settings for photos and videos that you have been tagged in, for example allowing only you to be able to see them.
3) Your Photo Albums
You can set privacy settings on each individual photo album that you upload to Facebook. With about 30 billion photos being uploaded to Facebook each year, odds are there are some photos that may be a bit more personal than others, and Facebook allows you to set the level for each album if you so choose.
4) Your status updates and wall posts
Recently, Facebook changed the way that you can control privacy when updating your status or posting to your wall. Now, each time you post an update you can select who (down to literally selecting friend by friend if you want to) will see your updates. The privacy button for the updates is right next to the "update" button when you publish a status update.
5) Your profile information
This is a basic one, but important. Go back to the privacy settings page and you can check off which information on your profile you would like to be visible to whom. If you are using Facebook for networking, you may want to keep work information viewable, while things like relationship status private.
None of these settings are any fool-proof way to ensure that you don't get embarrassed online or have personal information, private photos or videos or inappropriate status updates seen by the world. The best tip that anyone can give: If you don't want stupid photos of you showing up on Facebook, don't act stupid. If you must, then at least don't take pictures of it.
Studies routinely show that people are willing to share far more information online than they would be in a direct physical setting, so keep in mind how you would have felt about the information you are about to post to Facebook being on public display before this thing called Facebook came along - a time when communication between people was generally private by default.
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