Good day, Everyone! Today's post features Facebook Privacy Tips. Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. As you may know, many individuals, entrepreneurs and companies are utilizing it quite successfully as a business tool. You'll want to be knowledgeable about safely utilizing Facebook.
10 Solid Tips to Safeguard Your Facebook Privacy
Posted by: Dr. Joseph Mercola
September 29, 2009
"Facebook has over 300 million active users. It is growing VERY rapidly. In July of this year there were 250 million users and 75 days later they added another 50 million users. Please understand that Facebook will become as pervasive as phones and computers, so if you aren’t on already I would strongly encourage you to consider joining.
Unfortunately, most users don’t know the implications of entering personal information, making friends, and playing games on Facebook.
However these concerns are EASY to address if you follow the guidelines below. Please understand that I strongly believe Facebook now offers a very powerful way to leverage our influence and more rapidly change the fatally flawed conventional paradigm.
I am VERY excited about Facebook and spend a lot of my free time connecting with highly leveraged individuals and CEOs of major companies, and news media. I have several major national news correspondents and journalists as friends.
I’m currently in the process of brainstorming a strategy to optimize these new relationships, but once that is done we should be able to get the message out to well over ten million people.
At this time I believe Facebook is going to play a major role in the beginning of the end of the entire corrupt system.
Currently Facebook limits the number of friends you can have to 5000 and I reached that many months ago. So if you haven’t already done so, please join my Facebook Fan page which has around 20,000 fans at this time.
There is a good chance that Facebook will change the rules and open up the Fan page to friends in the near future, so please join my Fan Page now.
Once you join Facebook, or if you are already on it, please follow these guidelines to preserve your privacy.
1. Organize Friends in Lists
Friend Lists are the foundation of your Facebook privacy settings. Select Friends from the top menu, and use the Create link to create friend lists like Co-workers, Family, College Friends, etc. Your friends can’t see your lists, so you can name them whatever you like.
2. Customize Profile Privacy
Click Settings > Privacy Settings > Profile. Select which parts of your profile will be seen by whom. If you choose Customize in the drop down, you can be more specific. This is where the Friend Lists you created before become really useful.
Also go to the Contact Information tab and choose how you want your contact information to be shared on the Internet.
3. Set Facebook Privacy Level of Photo Albums
On the Photos tab of your profile page, click Album Privacy. Here again, you can use your Friend Lists to set the privacy for each photo album. Note that your profile pictures go into a special album that is always visible to ALL your friends.
4. Restrict Search Visibility
Click Privacy > Search to set your visibility when someone searches Facebook for people. This is an important way to safeguard your Facebook privacy.
5. Control Automatic Wall Posts and News Feed Updates
Your actions in Facebook such as comments, likes, appear as highlights on ALL your friends’ home pages. You cannot use friend lists here, only turn them on or off. Go to Privacy > News Feed and Wall and make your selections.
6. Set Facebook Wall Privacy
Go to your profile page, click Options > Settings under the status box. Here you can control whether your friends can post to your Wall, and who can see the posts made by your friends.
7. Avoid Appearing in Advertisements
Facebook has two types of advertisements: third-party and Facebook. Third-party advertisements are currently not allowed to use your pictures, but there is a setting to disallow it if it is allowed in the future. Go to Privacy > News Feed and Wall > Facebook Ads tab to turn this off.
8. Protect Yourself from Friends’ Applications
Go to Privacy > Applications, and click the Settings tab and uncheck all the boxes. These settings control what information about you is visible to applications installed by your friends. By default, these are set to visible. This means that your information is readily available to one of the million worldwide Facebook application developers, each time any of your friends takes a quiz, plays a game, or runs any other Facebook app. These settings control what applications installed by your friends can see about you, even if you don’t install the application yourself.
9. Privacy from Your Applications
There is no way to control what applications see about you; it is an all-or-nothing affair. The only thing you can do is to authorize only those applications you require and trust. Go to Settings > Application Settings from the top menu. Change the drop-down from Recently Used to Authorized. Here you can see all the applications you have authorized to get access to ALL your profile information. Remove the ones you no longer need. Also check the list of applications Allowed to Post and Granted Additional Permissions to remove unwanted ones.
10. Quitting Facebook? Delete, Don’t Just De-Activate Your Account
You can easily deactivate your account in Facebook from the Settings page. But deactivation will retain all your profile information within Facebook, including pictures, friends, etc. If you want to permanently delete your Facebook account, click here to submit a deletion request. Note that:
There is an unspecified delay between submitting your delete request and actual deletion.
If you login to Facebook, your deletion request is automatically cancelled.
There doesn’t seem to be any way to confirm that your request was completed.
Even after permanent deletion, copies of your photos may remain on their servers for technical reasons.
Sources: MakeUseOf.com September 13, 2009"
Note: Also, view "3 New Facebook Strategies for Building Your Personal Brand"
