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
- 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!!!
