Navigating & Understanding Facebook’s Privacy Settings
Facebook has grown into the most popular social media service in the world. Facebook’s user base has grown every quarter since 2009, and as of Q4 2016 it has over 1.86 billion monthly active users. Fortunately, putting out your pictures and information for 1.86 billion people to see doesn’t have to be very stressful due to Facebook’s pretty good privacy settings. Let’s take a look at these settings.
By clicking on each category, you can set which users can see what content you post, who can contact you, how they can contact you and more. For example, I’m not comfortable with attaching my phone number to my account for outsiders to find it, so I’ve set that to Friends. You can customize this page to your liking. You can also view all posts and things you’re tagged in which can be useful when looking for an overview of your profile. In this category there is one setting I want to discuss more thoroughly. The setting at the bottom “Do you want search engines outside of Facebook to link to your profile” is interesting. I’ve set it to no, though I’m not really sure how well this settings works to be honest. Though if you’re concerned about privacy and don’t want your profile to potentially be linked on the internet outside of Facebook then you can set it that way.
Next is the timeline and tagging settings, which cover the majority of the content that you post on Facebook. Here you can manipulate exactly who sees what. Don’t want your family members seeing photos of you partying? Outside of removing the tag and managing the posts you’re tagged in, you can exclude them from being able to view this content. Though, if you’re uncomfortable with this, maybe you shouldn’t be friends with them on Facebook. Might be worth thinking about.
Lastly, Facebook has a nifty privacy checkup tool which can be accessed by clicking the little “?” bubble on the top right of your timeline. With this tool you can quickly go through some privacy settings, most of which I’ve already outlined.
Facebook has quite a few privacy settings, and now you know how to use them. It goes without saying that by signing up for an account, you already give away some information. With some tweaking, you now know how to control who sees what and who can find you. Good luck!