Over the weekend I had a friend point out to me that my status update was displayed as public. Now I know that I have my privacy locked down. I am a huge proponent for checking that regularly (I check my settings several times a year). Even so, this one managed to sneak up on me. Additionally, I checked about 6 hours of my friends’ posts, and saw 8 who had also had this happen to them. I suspect that if I went back further I would find even more.
Whenever Facebook makes changes, it is a good idea to review your privacy and security settings. To check these, click on the gear symbol on the top right side of the Facebook screen:
Click on Privacy Settings and Tools.
Above are my recommended settings.
1) I highly recommend that you set your privacy to default to Friends only. If you think it through, if an average person has 100 Facebook friends, and you have your posts set to Friends of Friends, you are opening your posts to about 10,000 people!
2) I recommend using the Activity Log. This will notify you whenever someone tries to post anything on your timeline. That allows you to review and approve the post before anyone else can see it. This is one way to monitor things, and help to protect your online reputation.
3) I also recommend setting the “Do you want other search engines to link to your timeline?” to No. When this is set to Yes, there is information that will be available to public search engines. This means that if someone were to type your name into a Google Search, any public information (such as your name and profile photo) will now show up.
For a more detailed guide to Facebook Privacy and Security, I highly recommend this step-by-step process document posted on Facecrooks.com here.
