When using Facebook, its important to remember that the information you enter into your profile can be viewed by a large number of different people, including Facebook employees, members of your network, as well as your friends.
From this section, you can limit access in a variety of ways.
- Click on the “Privacy” link which appears at the top right of every page. This provides you several options.
- You can also limit specific areas of your profile to certain users.
- Contact information – this area is specifically important to restrict. We recommend keeping everything except for your email and AIM screen name private to non-friends. If non-friends want your contact information, they can always email or message you.
-
Wall, Friends, etc – not much harm exists in keeping these open to strangers, though future employers might engage in data mining and assign blame to you for certain actions through your on-line associations with others.
You can limit the people who can view your entire profile. Depending on the type of identifying information you have on your page, you may want to restrict your profile view to friends only. While it might seem convenient to have your profile open to meet new friends, that also allows people you don’t know to access your information.
Click on the “Edit Settings” tab under the search section. Here you can allow only friends to find your profile, when they type in your name in the search bar. This proves useful, if you do not want random people or employers to know that you have a profile.
You can block specific people by adding their names to the block list. This is useful to stop someone from harassing you online, while allowing others to view your profile. Keep in mind that an individual or employer may still access your profile using some one’s account, so do not rely on this tool exclusively.
Finally, you can limit specific people’s access to your profile; for example this could allow you to befriend administrators, while limiting what they could view.
Always treat Facebook as if it were a public website, never put anything in your profile that you wouldn’t be happy with your friends, family, employer or even a total stranger seeing.