How Private Is Your Facebook? The Four Things You Should Go Check On Right Now

You’d certainly get a shock if you saw the list of people who’ve ever settled down for a “creep” on your Facebook profile.

Potential employers, strangers, friends of friends, marketers… just to mention a few.

And now, with Facebook’s more-than-intricate, new-fangled search tool, it can allow strangers to discover who you are, what you like and where you go.

The social media network insists that it is up to you to decide on how much you want others to see, and that is true for the most-part, but the tricky bit is this.

You cannot entirely opt out of Facebook searches. It will, however, let you fine-tune who can see your Likes and photos.

The latest of its frequent changes was made to the site’s privacy settings in December and Facebook are nudging us to take a look at them.

Here are four simple questions (and the very handy solutions) the New York Times have asked their readers about their own Facebooks:  

1. How would you like to be found?

Go to “who can see my stuff” on the upper right side of your Facebook page. Click on “see more settings.” By default, search engines can link to your timeline. You can turn that off if you wish.

Go to “activity log.” Here you can review all your posts, pictures, “likes” and status updates. If you are concerned about who can see what, look at the original privacy setting of the original post.

Take care of photos that you are tagged in. They might be enabled to be seen by anybody.

2. What do you want the world to know about you?

Go to your profile page and click “About me.” Decide if you would like your gender, or the name of your boyfriend/ partner/ spouse, to be visible on your timeline. Think about whether you want your birthday to be seen on your timeline. Your date of birth is an important piece of personal information for hackers to exploit.

If you want to scan your page for certain phrases or words that could embarrass you as you apply for jobs or internships, try the Simplewash or Socioclean tool to help you find and delete them.

3. Do you mind being tracked by advertisers?

Several tools can help you block trackers. Abine, Disconnectme and Ghostery offer browser extensions. Once installed on your Web browser, these extensions will tell you how many trackers they have blocked.

4. Whom do you want to befriend?

Now is the time to review whom you count among your Facebook friends. Your boss? The group you met on a night away in Galway and haven’t seen since?

One of Facebook’s cleverest moves ever? Calling your connections your “friends”, they might not be.