Facebook Protection – Part 2
This adds onto the basic level of security that PART 1 covers from this series. Entering into Facebook for the first time has a certain level of intimidation to it. Shortly after you setup a profile in Facebook, you are inundated with requests from friends and people you vaguely remember, asking you to open up your personal information to them, all in the sake of keeping connections with people.
While it is the lack of animosity that makes Facebook successful over open platforms like MySpace, there is a certain amount of information we do not really want to disclose with everybody. We still want to share our vacation pictures with all of our friends and family, but perhaps not the classmate you had in preschool, whom you really don’t know any more.
This is a general template of steps you can take to protect your information from everybody, while continuing to share your life with the people that matter most.
Step One – Setup some Friends Lists.
Before you create a list for your bowling league or all of your classmates, understand that we want our lists to profile the person itself, not how you associate with them. You may have somebody at work that you do want to share with, while others you do not. To start, setup a list of friends which we will call “Limited Profile”, for the sake of this example.
At the time that I wrote this, there is an unfortunate clause that you won’t be able to make a friends list until you have 10 friends.
Step Two – Define the permissions
There is a high level of granularity available on what you can make open or restrict people from accessing, on your profile. Now that you have at least one friends list setup, you can use the Privacy Settings in your account to define how people in this group will see your information.
Once you are under Privacy Settings, you can configure individual settings for your Profile Page, who can find you in a Search, your New Feed, and what applications can access. We want to focus on the Profile section, and controlling what people can or cannot see about us.
There is a lot of options on this page, and two really powerful features that I love. Number one is that very first setting, which defines who can see your profile at all. If you change this setting to only viewable by your friends, you do not have to individually go down each other setting to keep any non-friends from seeing your profile.
The second feature on this page was the ability to type in a friends name at the top of the page, and it will show you an example of what your profile will look like, when that friend visits the page.
Step Three – Sorting
When you add a new friend to Facebook, you have the option to add them to a friends list when you accept their invitation. Make that part of your routine, after you setup a couple of layers or levels of visibility for people. Also become aware of content that you add. When you add a new photo gallery for instance, take a few seconds and apply the permissions.
If done correctly, you will end up with a very flexible, yet powerful system to protect your information.
Addendum – College Mode
If you are in college or school, and think this permissions thing is something to consider later, consider this. Your parents will be on Facebook soon. The college you go to, is already on Facebook and is watching the pictures you uploaded last night. The perspective employer whom you are trying to get your foot in the door with, is doing a search on Facebook to see what is out there for them to find. You can’t control who posts up pictures of you, but you can minimize visibility of who can find them.
Create a low visibility friends list, for your professors. When you see the invite to add them in, add them to the list, which will exclude items like “tagged photos of me”, or even status update.
