Facebook – Protect your Privacy
With over 500 million potential customers, Facebook offers a staggeringly powerful marketing tool for your business. But what about your personal profile? The openness of Facebook is a double-edged sword and if you aren’t careful you can reveal far more about yourself to the public than you might prefer to share, like the fact that you are away from your home for two weeks, or your home phone number.
This issue was brought under a powerful spotlight when a security consultant named Ron Bowes was able to download the names and web addresses of over 171 million Facebook profiles. How did he do this? Simply by using Facebook’s public directory of searchable profiles – the torrent is completely legal to create and download, because it contains information made publicly available by Facebook.
If you do not modify any privacy settings in your personal account, visitors from the Net can by default view your picture, your friends, information about yourself that you’ve entered into your profile, and some of your activities.
How can you protect yourself?
Log into your Facebook account, and in the top right corner there is a link that says ‘Account’ with a down arrow. Click on this, and then select ‘Privacy Settings’. You will be shown a chart outlining what information about yourself is accessible by whom. Clicking on ‘Customize Settings’ will allow you to set options to be viewable only by your friends, or only by you to make them 100% private.
Got a large friends list? You can filter your friends into categories so that only the ones you specify can access your profile.
Don’t forget to click on ‘View Settings’ under ‘Basic Directory Information’ to view your options for locking that down as well. This is how the security consultant was able to download so much profile information.
Lastly, be sure to click ‘Edit your Settings’ under ‘Applications, Games and Websites’ near the bottom to control what information your apps can access and share about you, and what your friends can share. Be careful – even if you disallow applications to share about you, this may not stop your friends’ applications from sharing information about you! Fortunately, you can lock down both options, even though you must do so separately.
Stay safe and happy surfing!
