If you haven’t heard, Facebook has recently introduced a new type of search the company has deemed “Graph Search”. If you have an active Facebook account, you can now search for not only people, but photo captions, check-ins, comments and even status updates from friends and strangers alike. This is in addition to the original ways you can search on Graph Search, which includes profiles and pages, photos and interests. In addition, you can now enter phrases and word combinations, like “posts from my family last month,” or “posts written by Sony”. You can do the same for your own posts.
However, as the amount of information you can search for widens, so do the questions of how private Facebook actually is. The key is what you allow in your privacy settings. Even if you allow small amounts of information to be seen by the public, just about anyone can find your profile. So what should you be checking to guarantee your privacy is protected?
Check Important Status Updates
The posts that were posted before you changed your privacy settings still remain public as long as you allow them to do so. Checking to see which statuses are private is quite easy – all you have to do is go to your profile page, click on the gear icon that resides on your cover photo, and then click “view as”. This will show you what a person that isn’t your friend will see when they visit your page. Any status that you’d rather just share with those you know you can click in the right hand corner to select a new privacy testing.
Check Your “About” Profile Section
A ton of your personal information resides in your about section. While there isn’t a whole lot of harm in people knowing which movies you like to watch, there can be danger in allowing your phone numbers or address to people you don’t know (or allowing them to search for those elements). Click on your “about” tab at the top of your profile, and select the privacy setting to make sure that it’s set to “friends”. You can set things like your employer to “public” if you’d like, or to help people who may be your friends find you.
Photo Privacy
Often, Facebook users care the most about the photos they allow others to see. If you’re a business owner, maybe you’d like to show pictures of you with happy clients. However, maybe you don’t want those who aren’t friends with you to see pictures of you and your children. It’s easy to change the settings of entire albums on Facebook by simply clicking the Photos tab on your navigation bar and clicking “Photos of You”. See if there are any photos or albums you don’t your non-friends should see, and hover over the displayed picture to change the settings on it.
Remember, what you make private and what you keep public is completely up to you, but the default settings on Facebook are a mixture of the two. Protect the information you want to protect well, but remember that you should also look like a person to those stopping by to visit your page to see who you are.