How Public Is Your Facebook Identity?

Posted by The Yodler

Photo Courtesy of The Joy of Tech Comics

Maybe you have a Facebook account for your business. Maybe you’ve created a fan page. Or maybe you’ve just decided that social networking can’t really help you grow your business. Either way, you’ve probably been hearing a lot on the news about Facebook privacy issues. How real are those concerns? What can you do to address them? This post aims to answer both of these questions.

How real are privacy concerns? The fact is that the internet has made a lot of information available to a lot of people. Facebook in particular has prompted a firestorm of criticism in the last several weeks by making changes to privacy settings without users’ knowledge. Even though Facebook recently launched a Facebook privacy page to address these concerns and update users, default settings tend to favor a more “open” social networking experience. That means you’re sharing information beyond your circle of friends.

What can I do? Fortunately, you can control much of how you share information on Facebook by changing your privacy settings. In order to access your privacy settings, simply click the Account drop down menu on the upper right hand side of your main Facebook page. From the drop down menu, select Privacy Settings.

There are four main categories pertaining to privacy settings: 1) Sharing on Facebook, 2) Basic Directory Information, 3) Applications and Websites, and 4) Block Lists.


1. Sharing on Facebook simply refers to your daily activity, such as status updates, photos and videos. This also includes information you share about yourself, like where you live and your birthday. You can choose whether or not you want everyone, friends of friends, or just friends to see your information. Or you can customize to indicate the level of sharing you want.

2. Basic Directory Information controls how non-friends on Facebook search for you and what information they can see. This applies to big corporate advertisers. You can determine not only who sees your information but also who can send you messages or different kinds of requests.

3. Applications, Games and Websites is a category to pay special attention to, because it affects how the outside world can interact with your profile. This has to do with third-party applications that can share your information with other websites (a feature that can be easily disabled by clicking a tick box) or whether or not your Facebook profile is searchable through search engines like Google (again disabled by clicking a tick box).

4. Creating Block Lists is as self-explanatory as it sounds: it refers to people or application invites (think Farmville) that you would like to block. Once blocked, they cannot interact with you in any way or vice versa.

Is that all there is to it? The above is just a simple overview of how to control your privacy settings on Facebook. There is much more information to wade through to get even more answers. Fortunately, there are some resources to help you.

ConnectSafely.org: This is a website dedicated to offering tutorials and practical advice in order to help you socialize prudently online. This link will take you to two videos the site produced specifically to explain Facebook’s privacy settings:

Privacydefender.com: Because of Facebook issues and other concerns related to social networking, there have been a few online services that have sprouted to help businesses and people manage their online reputations. Privacydefender is designed to help you to take full control over your Facebook privacy settings quickly and easily.