Social Networking has become a great tool for keeping up with family and friends, and feeling connected by knowing what people are doing in their everyday lives. Had it not been for social networking, I might not have known in a timely manner that one of my friend’s daughters is in the hospital struggling with kidney failure. Or, I wouldn’t have known about my other friend reaching a fitness goal of running three miles this morning. Social networking had definitely given us almost a real-time synopsis of people’s lives.

Without meaning to, we may be sharing a real-time synopsis if our lives with the entire world! To help you make sure you are sharing information in the safest way, I’ve listed some Facebook privacy setting recommendations below.

First, let me address how to get to these settings. After you log into Facebook, click on the drop down arrow next to “Account” in the right hand corner. Choose “Privacy Settings” from the drop down menu. From here, you will be taken to the main privacy settings page seen below.

Personal Information and Posts
The Personal Information and Posts settings let you decide who can see your photos, videos, personal information, and post to your wall. My recommendation would be to set all settings under this category to “Friends Only”.

Contact Information
Contact Information settings allow you to choose who can contact you through Facebook and who can see your contact information and e-mail address. With the exception of allowing Friends of Friends to “Add me as a friend”, all other settings should be restricted to “Friends Only”. Applying these settings will help protect you from unsolicited e-mails and phone calls from people you do not know, or people that are being malicious towards you. It also helps protect your privacy from potential identity theft as well.

Friends, Tags and Connections
The Friends, Tags and Connections settings control what shows on your profile and who can see that information. This information contains your family members, what city you live in, where you work/go to school, what interests and activities you have as well as things you like. Again, this area could be a gold mine for people trying to mine information for identity fraud. I recommend settings all these areas to “Friends Only”. I would also recommend that you take some time to think about if you want to tag your family members. If you are prone to accepting “friends” that you really don’t know that well, definitely stay on the safe side of protecting yourself.

Search
Do you want your Facebook profile to show up in public search listings through Facebook search or a search engine such as www.google.com or www.yahoo.com? To allow a good balance of friends to be able to find your listing, choose “Friends of Friends” for the Facebook Search Results and consider disallowing search engines to show your profile in public search results.

Applications and Websites
Did you know that your friends and the applications written for Facebook can share information about you?
• What your friends can share about you: Uncheck Family and Relationship Status, Relationship Details, About Me, My Birthday, My Religious and Political Views, My Photos, My Videos, Photos and Videos I’m tagged in
• Activity on Applications and Games: Friends Only
• Instant Personalization Pilot Program: This program takes your friends list from Facebook and automatically tries to sync you together with your friends on other services such as Microsoft Docs, Pandora and Yelp. I choose to not allow this and connect manually to my friends and colleagues on these other sites.

Two other areas of importance are on your actual Profile page. To the left of your profile page, under you photo, there is a box titled “Information”, to the right of the word “Information”, you can click on the pencil icon to bring up a sub menu. This submenu lets you choose if you want to show your relationship status, current city, religious views and website address on your main profile page.

In addition, you can choose to not show your birthday or your sex in your profile. From your profile page, click “Edit My Profile” under your photo. This section also allows you to update your likes, education, work, relationships, profile picture, and contact information.

As you begin using or continue using social networking sites like Facebook, take the time to learn where privacy settings are and set them wisely. And, always remember, what happens on the Internet DOES stay on the Internet. Don’t post anything you would regret!