Tips for Facebook Privacy

Facebook is the current leading social networking site with over 400 million active users worldwide, according to facebook.com. The site is a great way to stay in touch with old and new friends with one convenient website. However, Facebook also displays a lot of sensitive personal information that can lead to stalking, identity theft, and worse. Protecting your Facebook private information is vital for online safety regardless of your age. This article will look at five tips that will help you protect your Facebook account from potential predators.

1. Take your profile off search engines

Search engines, such as Google are the easiest way for people to find your account information on Facebook. By simply typing in your name, you can get a direct link to your Facebook profile. To protect yourself take your profile off search engines. Log into your account, go to privacy settings under the account tab, click "search", and uncheck the "Allow" box.

2. Never put your full birthday or address on Facebook

Identity theft is easier than ever when your full birthday and address are posted directly in your contact information. To protect your Facebook privacy replace your full birthday with only the month and day. To do this, click on "profile", then on "info", click on the "Edit" tab located across from "About Me", once here you will see your birthday with a tab directly across from it, click on the tab and scroll down to "Show only month & day in my profile".

3. Refrain from putting any sensitive information in your status update

You should never post a timeline of any sorts for your status update as it allows predators to know exactly where you are. For instance, if you are going on vacation for a week, do not post this for your Facebook status. This goes the same for putting up pictures of the vacation from your mobile phone while you are currently away from your house.

4. Are your pictures revealing?

Facebook pictures have caused a lot of trouble recently with colleges cracking down on drinking and drug use, as well as for potential job applicants. If you have pictures of you, partying or clearly intoxicated you should "untag" any and all these photos. To do this simply go to the picture in question and click on the "untag" option, and if it is from your personal photo album, delete the photos.

5. Be careful of who you accept as a friend

A good rule of thumb for accepting friends on Facebook is that if you do not know them in real life, then you should not friend them online. The profile could be an impersonator or worse, it is hard to know with the anonymity of online social networking.

Sources:

Personal experience using Facebook for over five years

www.facebook.com