I’m sure that many people have heard, “be careful what you post on Facebook,” and other social networking sites alike. In this day and age, employers are not hesitating to turn to Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, etc. to look over the profiles of their potential employees. Some people do not want to believe this, but as one of my old mentors said, “your generation is Facebooking your opportunities away.” I, in no way, am condoning that you hide things, other than personal information, but there are many different privacy settings available that some people may or may not know about.
My Facebook after tampering with the privacy settings.
Facebook is constantly changing their privacy settings. Everytime I seem to have my page completely locked up, they change something else that I have to hear about someone protesting in the news.
Most recently, I found out how to disable your name from turning up in all search engines, as far as Facebook is concerned. In my playing around, I also found out that some of my information that I thought I had blocked from people who are not my friends was still visible to them. They added on new settings that require you to individually go in and set who can or can’t see your status updates, wall posts, picture albums, things you like, etc. I could go on forever! One instance, I found out that because I had logged into Facebook from my cell phone, it automatically posted my number on my page. Despite my disabling the phone number setting, I had to manually go in and delete my number.
I’ve seen how-to article after how-to article on how to properly set your privacy settings, but they seem to get more complicated with the constant upgrades and add-ons to the site. I never knew that protecting yourself could be so hard!
Hopefully my YouTube video can help you better understand how to keep your personal information just that – personal.