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!!!