Facebook – Safety and Privacy Tips

Social Networking sites like Facebook is good for you to keep in touch with your family and friends, colleagues, or even long-lost school mates. However, ID fraudsters target Facebook and other social networking sites to harvest information about you.

Adjust Facebook privacy settings to help protect your identity

Unlike some other social networking sites, Facebook has provided some powerful options to protect you online – but it’s up to you to use them!

On your profile for example, by clicking on the "Lock" icon, you can set what your friends could view. You can also choose customize where you can set the group of friends or relatives who can view your information.

Sophos provides a great list of these privacy settings here.

Think carefully about who you allow to become your friend

Once you have accepted someone as your friend they will be able to access any information about you (including photographs) that you have marked as viewable by your friends. You can remove friends at any time should you change your mind about someone.

Show "limited friends" a cut-down version of your profile

You can choose to make people ‘limited friends’ who only have access to a cut-down version of your profile if you wish. This can be useful if you have associates who you do not wish to give full friend status to, or feel uncomfortable sharing personal information with.

Disable options, then open them one by one

Think about how you want to use Facebook. If it’s only to keep in touch with people and be able to contact them then maybe it’s better to turn off the bells and whistles. It makes a lot of sense to disable an option until you have decided you do want and need it, rather than start with everything accessible.

Do not upload too many private materials

Limit yourself from uploading too many personal materials like photos. Keep it to around 10 because your photos can be used as lure for others in obtaining private info like using your picture to lure your ex-classmates to give hackers the information they want. Who knows, you might bump into thousands of profiles bearing your unique name with your face!!

These tips are from Sophos ,one of the leading computer security companies.