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5.18.2010

How to harden your Facebook Account

How to Harden your Facebook Account

  • Create a friend list that is contains only those "friends" your truly trust!
    • I call mine "The Select Few"
    • This list should be pretty small in comparison with your actual FB Friends list
    • mostly it will contain close friends and family.
  • Go to the upper right menu and select
    • Account
    • Privacy Settings
      • Here is where the real work comes in
    • go into each of your settings and choose who is able to view:
      • use your personal discretion, but really you should limit personal (information that can distinguish you) to your "select list"
      • we will use Religious and Political as an example: Click It
        • Select Customize
        • Select Make this visible to: These People: Specific People...
        • Type the name the name of your list and it will populate
        • Click Save Settings
    • Again, you will need to do this for each setting.
  • Personal Information and Posts
    • Lots of little things you can choose set to your select list
    • Photo Albums is probably the most critical to protect... lets revisit it later.
  • In your Contact Information, realistically, this should be set to "Only Me"
    • the people who need this information, should be able to contact you privately for it
  • Friends, Tags and Connections is where you really use this new Select list, especially:
    • Family
    • Relationships
    • Photos and Videos of Me
    • Current City    
    • Hometown
  • Applications and Websites is another big one
    • What your friends can share about you allows you to 
      • Control what your friends can share about you when using applications and websites
      • Just uncheck it all!
    • As for applications themselves, you should routinely check back here to see what you have blocked and what you might still need to block
    • The instant personalization pilot program is has to be the worst part:
      • OPT OUT
      • If you find a site you do not mind sharing information with, you can "Manually" opt in for that site in particular.
  • Search
    • This is tricky and will determine why you are on Facebook
    • Do you want to be found on Facebook?
      • if you are trying re-connect with people, then you might leave this to "Everyone"
    • Do you want your Facebook profile to come up in a search engine like
      • Google
      • Bing
      • Yahoo
      • etc...
      • I Unchecked this... no need for my FB profile to be seen anywhere else
  • Block List allows you to hide from people you really want to hide from
    • stalkers
    • old girlfriends/boyfriends
    • certain family members
    • etc...
  • So lets revisit the Photo Albums privacy
    • You can do 1 of 2 things here:
    • For each album go in only allow your Select list to be able to see each, or
    • create another list called "Photo Share" and allow only photo share to see
    • You may want to play with this for certain albums, especially those containing pictures of your children.  Really, you only want select trusted people to see you children.
  • So what has all this accomplished?
    • You have created Friend lists (or Access Control Lists in security terms)
    • You can easily move people into this list and not have to worry about your content, because you know what list can see what
      • if you forget, you can always go through this exercise again
    • And now you realize just how much information Facebook really has the potential to share about you.
    • Finally, you now probably realize that the 2000 people who are connected to you are not really all your friends!
  • Stay Aware and keep you information private!!!

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