Facebook can be a helpful way to keep up with friends and share information. However, in some situations, sharing too much information can have horrible repercussions. From hackers to potential employers, unless you have secured your Facebook page, you don’t really know who has access to your details. If you haven’t already assessed your Facebook privacy settings, below are a few ways to help secure your Facebook Page.
This is probably the simplest and most effective tip. To make it harder for others to hack into your account, choose a password that features letters in both lower and uppercase as well as a few numerals. With any password, it is recommended that you change passwords every month, and use different passwords for different accounts.
Privacy settings are broken up into 4 categories on Facebook, so it’s important that you spend time going through each one. The majority of options come under the ‘Sharing on Facebook’ banner. Unless you want everyone on the internet to have access to your page, then it’s probably best to set most of your sharing settings to ‘friends only’. You can also decide whether you want your page to come up through search engines.
It’s important to think twice about what you ‘really’ need to post on your page. I’d advise against putting your address on your page. If you make your birthday visible, avoid writing your year of birth. It’s this kind of information that makes identity theft a possibility. If the privacy of your page is compromised, who knows who might be able to access this information?
If you have hundreds of people on your friends list, think about just how many of these people you really want knowing every detail of your life. When deciding who to keep on my friends list I ask myself the following question: if I saw them on the street, would I start a conversation with them? If the answer is no, then I don’t include them on my list. However if you can’t seem to cut down your friends list, take a look at the next tip.
Friend lists are a great way of organising your page visibility. If there are people you don’t want viewing certain photos or wall posts, you can simply give them limited access to your page. To do so, go to account > edit friends > create a new list. Then, when you are editing your privacy settings, use the customise option to hide any information from that list.
When you allow a third-party application access to your page, you are allowing them access to all of your information as well. How this information is used varies. If you are not comfortable with third-parties accessing your information, there is an opt-out option in your privacy settings. Alternatively, you can choose to block or avoid applications all together.
If you choose to stop using the website, it’s better to delete your account than to de-activate it. De-activation will retain all of your information such as pictures and friends. This means that it is still accessible by third parties. The tricky part with deletion, however, is that Facebook may still retain copies of your photos on their servers. Despite this, deleting is still a much better option than de-activating.
These days, once something is on the internet, it never truly goes away. It’s for this reason that you should always practice self-censorship when posting things on the internet. There are many ways to secure your Facebook page – what are your top tips?
Top image source: 7kanal.com