Understanding Facebook Privacy Settings

Understanding Privacy Settings

Knowing what privacy settings are and how to use them are important parts of the Facebook experience.

You have to be able to control who sees all of your personal information. It wouldn’t be pleasant if a stranger decided to access your pictures, posts, or birthday and shared it with a bunch of unknown third parties. It’s important to protect yourself and the best way to do that is by utilizing the privacy settings.

What Should You Know About These Settings?

1. There are four options to who can see the things you post and share – yourself, a list of friends, all friends, and anyone on Facebook. Whichever option you set it to those are the only people who will be able to view the particular information.

Let’s figure this out with an example. If you set up all of your private information and posts like your birthday, hometown, statuses, etc., to be visible only to your friends, then when someone who isn’t friends with you clicks on your profile, your page will seem empty to them. On the flip side, to your friends your profile will appear full of information and posts.

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2. No matter how many privacy settings you adjust on your profile there’s always a possibility that someone will see the information even though you don’t want them to. Facebook is a social and open platform, so multiple items could be viewed by people you are not friends with.

If you post a comment or picture on a friend’s page, more than that friend will be able to see the post. All of your friends will see what you’ve shared and maybe even friends of friends who you don’t know. It’s important to realize that what you wish to share with only one person may potentially reach hundreds of people, though that may be a bit exaggerated, it’s still a possibility.

3. If you don’t feel comfortable with at least one person you don’t know seeing something on your page then you probably shouldn’t post it. Once something is on the internet, it is basically there forever. Make sure you know what you’re posting on social media networks and be sure that you’re okay with plenty of people seeing it.

You can’t control what other people do on these sites, but you do have the power to make choices about your own posts. So, make certain that you won’t regret posting something on your profile or otherwise.


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