The privacy settings on Facebook are many and confusing. Some people are showing aspects of their profiles to the world that they don’t realize and which they’d rather not. Here, then, are my settings, which allow only friends to see just about everything I post, pictures and videos I’m in, and comments people make about my posts while still allowing the world to find me and add me as a friend on Facebook. Click the images for larger views.
Photos and Videos of Me: One very cool feature in Facebook is the ability to “tag” other people who appear in photos and videos. This allows others who browse the owner of the photo’s profile to see who else on Facebook appears. This also allows those same people to access your profile. Therefore, this setting is important to understand because even if you’ve set your level or privacy to mostly (or completely) “Only Friends,” the world can still access pictures and videos of you from other people’s profiles unless you set this to allow “Only Friends.” Then, only friends of yours (and not friends of your friend who tagged you in the photo) will gain access to these tags.
Photo Albums: If you click this setting, you’ll be presented with all of your photo albums where you can select the level of privacy for each one. This is another really great feature because it allows you to create albums with various levels of privacy. Therefore, you might want one album with pictures of, say, a new car you’re considering buying to be accessible to the world (perhaps to get feedback on, or whatever), and another album of, say, vacation photos that you only wish to share with friends.
Posts by Friends: This setting allows you to display your posts by friends on your profile but, depending upon the level of privacy you’ve set in “Posts by Me,” still disallow the world to see your own posts. This is especially useful if you have defined a group of people with whom you’d like (or not) to share this information. A practical use for this setting would be to allow a group of colleagues to see posts made by other colleagues while still disallowing these same posts from being viewed by friends and/or the world.
IM Screen Name: You might consider allowing the world to see this because, depending on the information that you’ve supplied on your IM profile, it’s a good way to allow anyone to contact you without revealing your email address. Also IM clients all have their own privacy settings, so you’re really not losing very much privacy if you allow the world to see this.
Website: This displays any websites you’ve added to your profile. The only reason not to allow this setting for the world to see is if one of them is, say, a corporate intranet. Otherwise, they don’t call it the world wide web for nothing! ;) Also, because almost everyone is on Facebook, it’s a very good way to promote your website(s).
Hometown: Disallowing this setting will keep your hometown from showing up in the Facebook directory. One important caveat to this is that you won’t show up in the search results of anyone looking to reconnect with you. On the other hand, if you set this to “Everyone,” you’ll be able to be “friended” by those people.
Send me a message: Facebook has an internal email application which allows people to send you private messages, much like email. I choose to allow only friends to contact me in this way because if someone wants to get in touch with me, they can just request my friendship – if they don’t want to do that, I probably don’t want to hear from them, either! ;)
These settings are really important to understand. Facebook allows open access to their API, which means that anyone can develop and deploy applications which run on the Facebook platform. And there are thousands of them. Virtually all of them will pull information about you from the various fields of your profile – i.e. hometown, name, email address(s), etc.
What you share: These settings are pulled from your PRIVACY SETTINGS >> PROFILE settings. Therefore, applications will have access to this information, as well. However, it’s important to note that applications will not be able to circumvent your privacy settings in any way; so, if, for example, you’ve allowed “only friends” to see photos of you, these applications will follow the same rules and not display photos of you, either.
What your friends can share about you: Many Facebook applications allow their subscribers to share profile information. Depending upon the privacy settings of your friends, these applications can (and oftentimes do) pull information from the user’s profile, such as his/her friends. Therefore, if you’re a friend of someone who’s using an application that does this, whatever information you’ve elected to share will also be available to these applications. Clicking “Edit Settings” will give you another layer of privacy control.
Activity on Applications and Games Dashboards: Many of the Facebook applications are “social,” which means that they’re popular because they involve many people’s participation. This setting, then, will allow you to restrict what information about you and your participation with the particular application is displayed to your friends as well as anyone else who is using it. While this is an important aspect of such social applications, you may want more control over who sees what. Like I said, applications cannot circumvent your privacy settings, but this setting does give you another layer of privacy by disallowing even your friends to see your interactions with any of these applications. If you want to disallow everyone from seeing this information (which could significantly limit the appeal and/or game-play of such applications), there’s one extra step that you must take: on the setting dropdown, select “Custom” and then “Only Me” from the “These People” dropdown.
Facebook Search Results & Public Search Results: This one is important because I want to be able to be found by anyone searching for me from within Facebook but not in world-wide search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc.