5 Tips for Facebook Privacy to Protect Your Family

Many of us use facebook a lot regularly. Social media has helped us to connect with our old friends and also to make new friends. But, the new concerns about Facebook are to protect our data and how much to reveal ourselves to the world.

Because of the recent revelation about Facebook collecting our personal data, there is more concern everywhere on how to protect our data. You can check the data saved on your Facebook account by downloading a copy :

1. Go to Settings by clicking on down arrow mark next to the question mark in the top right corner and clicking on ‘Settings’

2. click on ‘Download copy’ in ‘General Settings’

This will send a zip file to your email and it will have all the data that Facebook stored on your account.

I think, there will be more regulations in future on protecting user’s data while using apps.But, meanwhile, we can focus on what we can do to keep our data protected on Facebook.

Here are the tips that helped me. Let me know if these make sense to you as well.

1. Protecting basic data

It is important to protect basic data like birth year, the house address where we live, our phone number and email. To check the Privacy of this information, Click on your profile link (clicking on Profile picture), Navigate to ‘About’ Tab and verify this information. Click on ‘Edit Contact and Basic Information’ link. Each piece of information will have an icon next to it showing if the info is open to Public/ Only to friends etc., We can change the setting on to whom this basic information should be visible. Ensure that this is not public.

2. Status Updates

While the step 1 is to protect our basic data, the next step is to ensure that our everyday status messages are not revealing the information that is more than required. I use Facebook lists while posting my status messages. While I promote my blog posts by making them ‘Public’, I share my status messages and personal photos only with ‘Friends except Acquaintances’. You can also share the information with a specific set of people like people residing in your area/ to the people who work in your company etc.,

3. Profile Picture and Cover photos

We can protect photos uploaded to Facebook by sharing the albums specifically with friends or some people as we do for status updates. But, The profile picture and cover photos are public. So, try not to use children’s photos as profile pictures or cover photos as anyone else can download and misuse them.

4. Adding New Friends

It is very important to take care while adding new friends and managing them. One basic rule is not to add strangers and people who are not friends on Facebook. If you have to add a friend you made during any journey about whom you don’t know much or someone who met at a conference or some party, follow this:

• Add them as a friend.
• Click on their profile, you will see ‘Friends’ dropdown.
• Click on it and select ‘Aquaintances’.

Whenever you share a status update or a picture, you will have an option to select ‘Friends Except Acquaintances’ so that your personal pictures are not shared with strangers.

5. Timeline and Tagging

If we are not sharing our information, our location, and pictures, there is another way of this information being leaked. This can be done by your friends when they tag you. So, just check the below settings once.

“Settings >> Timeline and Tagging”.

Here, you can set “Review posts you are tagged in before the post appears on your timeline” as ‘ON’. The other setting on this page are self-explanatory and are important.

Those are the basic things that we can take care of for Facebook Privacy. I hope, this will help as a first step towards protecting our data on Facebook.

What other tips will you use to protect your privacy on Facebook? Do let me know in comments. And make sure to share this post with your friends.

    Mahathi Ramya is a mom of 2 boys, a blogger, software testing professional and a classical dance teacher. She writes on books, travel, and parenting. She loves writing, traveling and painting a lot.