What’s going on – That’s the first thing that we’re greeted with when we open Facebook. At some stage, people do share their feelings, emotions, love, hate, anger and ‘what not’ on Facebook. All these things pile up and build up a place that needs to be secured from prying eyes. We wouldn’t want our private moments to go public, just because of our poor knowledge of privacy controls on Facebook.
In the end, it’s your account and its “you” that will need to take some steps to ensure that your private stuff remains private.
To compound the issue, Facebook’s new Graph search tool allows strangers to discover who you are, what you like and other detailed information about you. Amidst all these, it is necessary to protect your account and fine tune settings about who can see your Facebook activities. Let’s take a look at some tips that can help you stay private on the social network – Facebook.
Prevent Search Engines to Find your Facebook Profile
If you want to prevent your Facebook profile from appearing in search engines, then here’s how you can do it.
Go to Privacy Shortcuts from the upper right side of Facebook and click on “See more settings.”
By default, search engines can link to your timeline. Click on Edit and then uncheck “Let other search engines link to your timeline.”
View Complete Activity Log
Did you know that you can view a complete activity log of your activities on Facebook and remove anything that you’re not comfortable with?
To do this, go to Privacy Settings > Who can see my stuff and click on “Use Activity Log.” From here, you can review all your posts, likes, status updates and tagged photos. You can hide your activity from Timeline, delete activity, unlike and do much more.
Remember – never ever share anything on Facebook that’s embarrassing or something that can put you in danger, not even with a small group of friends – you don’t know when they’ll take advantage of that status update, picture or video that you share.
Time to Re-think your “About” Page
Visit your Timeline and click on “About.” From here, click on edit and edit any information you’re not comfortable sharing with others. For example; from the birthday settings, you can change the visibility from Public to Friends, Only Me or Custom. A good idea would be to change the visibility of such settings to only friends.
Simplewash, formerly Facewash, can help you clean up your Timeline from a list of pre-compiled words that can be considered offensive or alarming to those viewing your profile. This tool can search for such terms and cleans up your Timeline. A must have to do some spring cleaning – you can’t manually find and remove each and every activity.
Avoid Getting Tracked by Advertisers
Facebook’s widget is found in almost every popular site. This means Facebook can track your web activities. That’s where browser extensions like Ghostery and Disconnect Me can help you. Once installed, these extensions can detect and block such services from tracking your online activity.
Think Twice Before Adding a Friend
Do you really want to add your boss, co-worker, or your competitor as your friend and want to share every ‘minute’ detail with them? Seriously? Think twice before adding a friend because the person that you think is your friend may not be.
Privacyfix is one such browser extension that allows you control your privacy settings on many websites, including Facebook. The extension runs a checkup of your privacy settings and lists out all the cookies that are tracking you via the browser. Besides just identifying cookies, the extension can also take you to the page where you can make fixes, and also explains every particular setting in detail. Privacyfix can block over 1000 such sites, but it’s mainly focused on Facebook and Google.
One thing’s for sure. Many people don’t take time to explore their privacy settings. Well, if you don’t take time to configure these privacy related settings, it might harm you in the future. Spend some time to take a look at these settings – they are worth the time spent.
