Firstly, if you have a Facebook account, your consented to their terms of service. Somewhere in that legal spew they call a TOS, you agreed to allow them to do bloody whatever they wanted to do with your personal information as soon as you clicked to accept whatever it was you just scrolled through because Dan Brown wasn't sitting over your shoulder waiting to decipher it all.
So if you want to protect yourself - here's a few tips:
Don't set your profile so everyone can see it. Do you have any idea how many creepy, weirdo, stalkers are out there? Let alone serial killers? C'mon use some common sense.
This little thing here is where you go to access nearly everything on your Facebook account:
As you can see, I marked the inverted triangle with a perfect circle. (Maybe if I were Michael J. Fox.) These is where you find your account settings. Click on it.
Wow, look at that gorgeous highlighting work. I should have been a beautician! Click on settings.
This window will open:
Select "Privacy" from the left hand menu and these are the settings to pay attention to:
"Who can see my stuff?"
Who can see your future posts?"
For all that is good and clean in this world, set it to "Friends." This protects you from strangers peering at your business. Do you really want some creeper checking out pictures of your kids and looking for landmarks that would point to your house? Man, I hope not because that would make you a lousy parent. This also prevents potential employers from prying. Your political and religious affiliations are your business, and if an HR person happens to be a Muslim Hating Right Winger and sees you're Proud Liberal, you ain't getting the job.
"Limit the audience for posts you've shared with friends of friends or Public?"
Set it to "Limit Past Posts." This hides everything you posted in the past to all except friends. If you don't anything you've posted as public stays public.
"Who can contact me?"
'Who can send you friend requests?"
Leave it set to everyone. If you don't know the person, don't accept their invite. You may miss out on a family member or long time friend from school if you don't.
"Whose messages do I want filtered into my inbox?"
Leave it to the default 'Basic Filtering.' Yes, that means anyone can PM you, but again, if you don't know the person, don't reply back. If you set it to 'Strict Filtering' you could definitely miss something important. People who are limited by this setting have their messages to you go to an "Other" folder and you don't get a notice. If the people want to get noticed, they have to spend money, and then they'll get mad at you even though you don't get the money.
"Who Can Look Me Up?"
"Who can look you up using the email address you provided?"
Really, this needs explaining? Unless you get some kind of sick, twisted fascination with having your ESP inbox exploding with spam. set it to "Friends."
'Who can look you up using the phone number you provided?
"Friends." Seriously. You write your digits on a piece of paper and hand them to someone. They think you're a creep and toss the paper. A real creep finds it and searches the number and boom you're discovered.
'Do you want other search engines to link to your time line?"
Use your discretion.
Now the safest way to keep your prospective employers, mates, or business partners for seeing what a total tool you are in real life, is to create a 2nd account with a different phone number and keep it clean, family oriented, as well as politically and religiously neutral. Use that on resumes and others. Keep the privacy setting like above, but if you get a friend request from someone you want to see the nice side of you (even if it is a total lie) there will be no surprises.
That's all for now. Next up, "Getting Rid of Annoying People."
Thanks for reading!
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