I have been hearing and reading from a lot of different people about the growing concern regarding privacy on Facebook and wanting to quit. First of all, if you don’t want to share something that might be a little compromising, do not put it up online in the first place. It would make your life a whole lot easier.
However, if there are things you share that you want to limit who sees them and how they can share them, hopefully this post helps you accomplish that. In order to update your settings with the new Facebook Privacy Settings, just follow these simple steps and you should be able to restrict what you want, from who you want.
Note: If you click the image, it will actually direct you to that page on Facebook.
Here is a step-by-step instruction guide on how to reduce the amount of information you are sharing to third and unwanted parties but as I said earlier, the best protection against shared information is to not share it at all.
1. First on your main profile page, select the “Account” button on the top right corner of the page and select “Privacy Settings“.
2. Now select the 4th item down on the list, “Applications and Websites“.
3. Once you are on this page, there are a couple of options for you (“What your friends can share about you” and “Instant Personalization Pilot Programs”) but I would certainly recommend both of them. If you only want to do the first one, go to step 4 but skip 5. If you only want to do the second one, go to step 5 and skip 4 — but again, I would recommend at least taking a look at both.
4. For “What your friends can share about you“, you can see that Facebook lists a whole range of items that you can grant access to your friends and whatever applications they use to share those information. Go through the list and anything you feel comfortable with being shared across applications, check away and naturally, uncheck anything you don’t want shared. Make sure to hit the “Save Changes” button on the bottom of the page to ensure your selections are saved.
5. Now select the “Applications and Websites” button on the top left corner and select “Instant Personalization Pilot Program“. Facebook connects with many websites so you can quickly connect with your friends and see and share relevant content on their sites. If you don’t want to share such information or don’t want to have the personalization and information sharing across many of these sites, just uncheck the box below the image on the page.
Now you have taken steps to share less information but I’ll reiterate for a third time, don’t post anything you don’t necessarily want to share with the rest of the world. With the constant privacy policy changes by Facebook, I would consider nothing safe and they keep a copy of all information on their servers anyway.
Any comments, questions or suggestion on this post or any other, feel free to leave me a message below or contact me in any other form that you know. Happy Surfing.
