FACEBOOK PRIVACY

It’s watching you, keeping tabs on the places you frequent, where you live, who your friends are, and even what you like. Moreover, with your facebook network visible beyond your immediate circle of friends, an inebriated indiscreet Facebook rant or wall post can have serious personal, and in some cases, professional consequences. Now, we’re not advising you to delete your account, and hide under a rock—using this wildly popular site wisely just takes being forearmed. Use these tips to tweak Facebook’s privacy settings to have full control over who sees what in your social network.

FACEBOOK PHOTOS:More than your wall posts, you should be even more discreet about the photos you share in your photo albums, since they’re the easiest to copy off and can come back to haunt you later. Now, aside from the Privacy Settings under your Account options, each time you share a photo/album, you can set the privacy level for each item. Just click on the lock drop down menu next to the Share button, and you can control who sees the photo/album: Everyone, Friends of Friends, Friends Only, a Custom list of people or no one but Yourself. You can even block certain people in the Customize option from seeing these photos if you really need to. And if there are photos on someone else’s albums where you’ve been tagged and you don’t like that one bit, you can untag yourself from any picture, which will remove it from Facebook’s ‘View Photos of Me’pages. Once the tag is removed, you cannot be retagged on that particular photo again.

FACEBOOK PLACES: Checking in everywhere you go may sound cool at first, but you’re also unwittingly broadcasting your location down to a few feet to just about anyone who cares to check your profile page, ill-intentioned or otherwise. If that’s way more than you want to reveal, you can click on the Account menu > Privacy Settings. From there, click Customize settings (the link is at the bottom left of the page, and under the ‘Things I share’ section, select the level of privacy you want in the ‘Places you check in to’ option. While you’re at it, restrict whether your friends can check you in to places by going over to the‘Things other share’ section, and disabling the‘Friends can check me in to Places’ option.

FACEBOOK APPS: Worried sick that a prospective employer will chance upon your profile and think all you do is run a farm/café/mafia/car racing business? Or are your friends shaking their virtual fists at you for pushing useless app updates on their news feed? Head over to the Privacy Settings, and at the bottom left is a link to the privacy options for ‘Applications and websites’. You can edit your settings for games and apps, especially the most spammy ones, so that only you get to see the updates on your profile page, and not your friends or business acquaintances. And while you’re there, head to the ‘Info accessible through your friends’ section and check off any information you do not want apps (or your friends for that matter) to be able to share about you—such as your photos.

INSTANT PERSONALISATION: If you’re logged into Facebook for the bulk of the day, certain sites like Bing and TripAdvisor can serve up a personalised version of the site based on data from your account. Which data? Essentially, any information that is set to be visible to ‘Everyone’, something as simple as your name, gender, your profile picture or your birthday can be used by the website to tweak their site to look more meant ‘just for you’. While this list of sites is controlled and safe, if you want to turn it off completely, head over to the Apps and websites section under Privacy Settings, and under the heading ‘Instant Personalization’, click Edit settings, and untick the ‘Enable instant personalization on partner websites’ box.

FRIEND LISTS: Friended too many folks at work? Use the lists feature to group your friends and then assign each group different levels of access to your information on Facebook, based on your reading of their loyalties or sensibilities. Once done, every time you go into custom Privacy Settings, you can select “Specific People” from the drop-down menu and enter the name of the Friend List with whom you’d like to share/exclude the content. Of course, if you add a friend to more than one friend list, and those friend lists have conflicting privacy settings, the more restrictive of the privacy settings will become applicable .