Facebook Privacy: 101
UPDATE: Facebook has moved a couple of things around while âsimplifyingâ their privacy controls. Most of the information here is still valid, though. You want to âcustomizeâ your privacy settings and not use one of their defaults for the most control. I was going to try and keep this updated, but itâs almost better if I just make a new post on my new blog.
I get a lot of questions about how to use Facebookâs new (ish) privacy features so I thought Iâd go through a quick 101 tutorial on settings things up and using them effectively. Iâll try and keep this as simple and quick as possible but I will also be covering all you really need to know about keeping your Facebook profile and the information you post on it safe.
Where do we start? We need to create some friends Lists. A friends List on Facebook is just a collection of friends for your eyes only. Your friends will never know what lists they are in (unless you tell them) so theyâre just for you. If you really WANT to go all out and create that âAssholesâ list, feel free without worrying about a thing. Follow the pictures and this should go swimmingly.
Select Account â Edit Friends from the top menu of Facebook
Here is your friends page! This page will recommend friends to you as well as give you various methods of organizing them. We want to view ALL of our friends right now..
Select Friends from the left side under Lists
There we go. Now we have all of our friends to look at. Letâs start organizing them by creating a new listâŚ
Select the button labeled âCreate New Listâ
Youâll get a nice popup that should be easy to understand. Itâs asking for a name for this new list and it gives you all your friends to select from already. You can scroll down this list or type in the names of people who you know you want to put in this list. Donât worry about missing someone. Once you create a list, you can always add and remove people from it at any time.
Name the list and start adding some friends
Like I said, once a list is created, you can modify it any time. This friend I have selected below is already in 1 of my lists, but I want to add her to my Friends list as well. I click the â1 Listâ button that appears to the right of her and I can see all of my lists. Just select another list and youâll see a check-mark next to it. Now this person is in 2 of my lists! If you want to remove someone from a list, just click a list that already has a check-mark and the person will be removed.
Select another friend and add or remove them from another list
Now that we have a List of friends, we can venture into actually securing our profile. Your profile is pretty much everything about you on Facebook. It includes your information like your birthday and relationship status. It also includes your wall posts, photo albums youâve uploaded and pictures that others have tagged of you. Facebook recently dumbed this page down quite a bit to make it much easier to set the privacy exactly as you want it.
Select Account â Privacy Settings
You can explore the other options after this tutorial. Iâll only be covering the Profile Information section. The other sections let you control who can contact you, who can search for you, and what applications have access to your information.
Select Profile Information
You now see about a dozen different items that can be set. Thereâs a brief description of each item so you know what your controlling. Take your time here. Thereâs no rush at all. This is your âlifeâ, by the way. Getting your profile to appear exactly as you want it to, to exactly who you want it to is not a 30 second job.
You can tailor every item quite a bit but for the sake of this tutorial, Iâll give you all my personal example which is a âLimited Profileâ list. You can call it whatever you like, but I suggest everyone have one. Facebook used to actually have something called âLimited Profileâ so I just stuck with that.
Another quick note on the Limited Profile. A while back when Facebook changed some privacy settings, the old âLimited Profileâ list lost all itâs âlimited-nessâ. So make sure you take a look at these settings and set that up again!
Ok, back on track. Letâs select the very first item. It should be called âAbout Meâ
You have a few options here..
Everyone will show off this information to anyone and their mothers. Nothing will be safe with this information. No one has to be your friend to see this. You probably donât want this for your About Me section, but there are places where you might not care so much. For instance, everyone can see my birthday on Facebook because I really donât care if they do.
Friends of Friends. The next step down in security. This will make sure not just anyone can see this information and limit it to only friends of your friends. Pretty self explanatory.
Only Friends is also quite self explanatory. Only your friends will be able to see this section of your profile. This might be how you want to do things for parts of your profile, but I feel itâs still a bit too loose for your About Me section.
Custom. Now this is what we want to see. Detailed controls! Custom opens up another option that weâll be using.
Select Custom
There are now two sections here. Iâd suggest you keep your first option set as âOnly Friendsâ to keep this information only visible to people who you accept as a friend. But now you can specify a friend or a friend list to exclude from this section. This is where I put my Limited Profile group.
Now you can Save Settings and proceed to the next item. Set up each of these the way you want based on what your comfortable with. You can lock down or loosen up to your hearts content. A few sections you might want to look at are listed below for you.
Personal Info. This is the section where you put down all the movies, and music and interests you have.
Family and Relationship. You family and relationship status should be listed here.
Photos and Videos of Me. This would be all the things your friends are tagging you in. Since you donât have a lot of control (aside from removing the tag) over what your friends tag of you, Iâd concentrate on keeping this limited to closer friends.
Photo Albums. This is the only different setting on the page. It takes you to a list of all your photo albums and allows you to set privacy settings for each of them individually.
Posts By Me. Anything you write on your wall/home page. Links. Photos. Notes. Whatever. You can actually keep this a little looser if you want because right after this, youâre going to learn how to control each and every post you make.
Allow Friends to Post on my Wall. Iâm sure there are a couple reasons you wouldnât want ANY of your friends to be able to write on your wall. But I canât think of any right now.
Posts by Friends. A better idea than not letting friends write on your wall at all, is controlling who can see what they DO write!
Play around with all the settings here! No really. Go! Iâll wait..
All done? A quick tip for you, now, is the âPreview My ProfileâŚâ button on the top of the Profile Information Privacy page. This button is very magical in that it lets you view your profile through the eyes of someone else. You can see how all your hard work tweaking profile settings has paid off by seeing exactly how someone else will see your profile!
Hit the âPreview My ProfileâŚâ button on the top of this page and enter the name of a friend who you shouldnât see a certain section (maybe someone from your Limited Profile list)
Weâre going to cover 1 more topic here and then youâre ready for the real world! This is a newer feature that Facebook just released a month or so back. It letâs you have fine-grained control over who sees things you post on Facebook. Head back to your home page and we can post a status to only a certain group of friends.
Click the âlockâ icon next to the Share button and youâll have some options on who will see this post
These options should all look familiar to you so letâs just jump straight into Custom again
This time, instead of selecting âOnly Friendsâ like we did in our Profile Information, weâre going to select Specific People. This will let us type the name of specific friends or lists of friends that we want to see this post. Very straight forward. You may want to include a name or a list in the âHide This Fromâ section if you have some friends in 2 lists. For example, you want to share with your âPeople From Workâ list, but you wish to hide it from your âManagers From Workâ list. This is only necessary if the âManagers From Workâ also reside in your âPeople From Workâ list.
Go ahead and save those settings and share your post! Youâll see a tiny little lock sandwiched between the time of the post and the comment link. If you hover over this, it will display who can see this post.
I think that about covers it! Once you understand how the privacy controls work on Facebook, they really arenât that hard to master. With a little practice, you should be an expert at controlling who sees what on your Facebook page. Now go have fun!
P.S. Another quick tip that I learned while actually writing this tutorial is that the âPreview My Profile..â link from the Profile Information page mentioned earlier actually works in previewing who can see wall posts as well. You can use this to make sure that post you just shared isnât visible by your âManagers From Workâ.











