Protecting your privacy when using Facebook

Everybody uses Facebook now, right? We use it to keep in touch with our friends, to share photos, to organise events. But did you ever stop to think that people use it for more sinister reasons? Hiring managers use it to check out potential employees (imagine going to a job interview, putting on your best professional performance, only to have it ruined when the interviewer looks up your Facebook entry and sees that photo of you from New Years eve! Not a career-enhancing move!)

Or, did you consider the identity thief, who wants to impersonate you and empty your bank account. All they need is some information about you, and what better place than that treasure trove in your Facebook profile:

• phone numbers
• date of birth
• email address
• residential address
• political & religious views
• schools
• places of work, etc, etc.

We’re making it too easy for them!

The good news is that Facebook allows us to keep that information from being viewed by the world at large. Here are some tips on how to protect your privacy while using Facebook:

1) The first rule is – if you don’t have a good reason for giving Facebook your information, then don’t do it! Do you really need to put your phone number in there? Surely all your friends already know your phone number! Go through your Facebook profile and delete any information that doesn’t need to be there.

2) Don’t give Facebook your credit card details! Or, if you want to pay for something, don’t get Facebook to store your credit card details for next time. If Facebook does get hacked, you don’t want to be part of the collateral damage. Go to 'Settings', 'Account Settings', 'Credit or Debit cards' and remove any cards you have stored.

3) Have a think about who you want to be able to see what information. At a minimum you should restrict your profile so that only your friends can see any information about you. But you can be more granular than that through the use of ‘Friend Lists’. Do you want to hide your party pics from your work colleagues? What about your parents? Set up ‘friend lists’ for each group of people whose access you want to restrict in some way (click on ‘Friends’, then ‘Make a new List’). I’ve just got one group for my professional colleagues. You may want to create more?

4) Once you’ve created your Friend Lists, you can configure who can see what. Go to your privacy settings (‘Settings’, then ‘Privacy Controls’). There are four options here, and you should look at all of them:

a. Click on ‘Profile’. Have a read through each of the options. Think about which friends, or friend lists you want to be able to see each type of information. At a minimum you should set all of these items to be viewable by ‘Only Friends’. You may want to further restrict this, for example to hide photos from your work colleagues scroll down to ‘Photos Tagged of You’ and click on ‘Edit Custom Settings’ just below. Where it says ‘Except these people’, type the name of your colleagues friend list into the box, and click on ‘Okay’. Done!

b. Click on ‘Search’. i. When random strangers type your name in the search box, do you want your name to come up? If not, don’t set your ‘Search Visibility’ to ‘Everyone’. ii. When your name does come up in a search, do you want them to see your profile picture? Your list of friends? If you don’t want strangers to see this information, then remove the tick from those boxes. Do you want them to be able to request to add you as a friend? If not, then remove the tick from the ‘A link to add me as a friend’ box.

c. Click on ‘News Feed and Wall’. This page allows you to control which actions of yours result in all your friends being told about it. If you don’t want your friends to know every time you write on someone’s wall, remove that tick from the box.

d. With applications, you can’t change any settings. Basically, any dodgy person can create an application. If you load an application into your Facebook profile, that application can access any information about you that you have stored in Facebook that it likes. There are two lessons here: i. Re-iterating point 1 – only store the bare minimum information you can on Facebook. ii. Don’t install applications unless you have a good reason to do so. The more you install, the greater the chance that you’ve got a dodgy one that will abuse your trust and misuse your information. Once you’ve done all this, you can relax and enjoy using Faceback safely!