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Take control over your Facebook profile privacy




Wired has a wiki article on how to Un-Facebook Yourself or in other words: how to avoid becoming too social. Ignoring the more drastic possibility of permanently deleting your Facebook account, you basically have two options:

1 – Go completely private:

Facebook’s default privacy settings are in the middle of the road. They make everything you do on the site visible to your friends, as well as the networks you belong to. That means, by default, your Facebook profile is not open to the entire world. Networks are cities, companies or universities, each of which could still be many thousands of people. So, the default privacy is fairly closed, but you can make yourself even more private.

Load Facebook’s privacy settings and click on Profile. You will then see a list of categories, such as profile or photos, each with a dropdown box to control who will see items in that category.

Your choices:

  • Everyone (choose this option only if you want to be completely public)
  • My Networks and Friends (the default)
  • People at main network and Friends
  • Friends of Friends
  • Customize

If you choose the final option, Customize, you can select the only friends setting, which is the most restrictive setting. In this case, members of your networks who are not your friends will not be able to see your profile. If you want to make some networks able to view your profile (say, your university or company), but others not (your entire city, for example), you can change the All of My Networks setting to Some of My Networks. You’ll then get the chance to select the networks for inclusion.

For even more fine-tuned control of your Facebook privacy, read on to restrict individuals or apply settings to a custom group of friends.

2 – Restrict some contacts:

The customized privacy controls allow precise control over who can see what about you on Facebook. You can use them to restrict how open you make your content to particular friends — or groups of friends.

Load Facebook’s privacy settings and click on Profile. Then select the category you wish to restrict. Finally, select Customize… from the dropdown box.

Choose the friends to allow: To create a whitelist of friends that can see content in the category you chose, select Some Friends. Then, you’ll need to type in each friend you want to include. Privacy on the internet is a lot of work. It makes it easier if you create friend lists, as you can include an entire group of friends at once instead of choosing from among your friends one at a time. Just click the little icon to the right of the input box and select one of your lists.

Choose friends to restrict: If you’ve been smart about whom you accept as a friend, you probably only have a few that you want to keep from seeing some of your content. In those cases, you’ll want to let your friends see everything, but restrict the few.

In the same window where you can choose friends to allow, look to the bottom to find Except These People. Type the name of the friends you want to restrict in the box below. If you have several friends to restrict, it’s another good case for including them on a friends list. Then, you can restrict the entire group at once by typing the name of the list. 

» Read more in Wired‘s Un-Facebook Yourself wiki article.

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Take control over your Facebook profile privacy Posted by on December 15, 2009 at 5:09 PM. Use this trackback if you're linking this story.

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