Be sociable and safe with our Facebook privacy tips
Social networking websites such as Facebook (www.facebook.com) can keep you in touch with friends and family. However, as people share more of their personal life in this public domain, the risk is that hackers and cybercriminals will use your personal data for their own gain. It's important that you keep personal details about your activities and interests, as well as sensitive information such as your phone number, private within a network of friends. If in doubt, don't share it at all. Facebook updated its privacy features in December 2009; here, we provide our top tips on keeping data safe on the revamped site. The same principles about sharing data apply to any networking site. 1. Protect your profile Your Facebook profile information (including your name, profile picture, gender and current city) can, by default, be viewed by everyone online, which could compromise your privacy. To ensure your profile is protected, click Settings and from the drop-down menu click Privacy Settings. On the next screen click Profile Information. This will list the information contained within your profile; for instance, your Status and links, personal information, and Facebook photos where you've been tagged. Use the drop-down menus beside each of these to dictate whether only yourself, friends, friends of friends or everyone can view these personal details. 2. Filter your friends Many people include their boss among their Facebook friends, forgetting they have a different relationship with them than others on their friends list. To help you manage differing relationships, Facebook lets you categorise people into separate groups. To do this, click Friends and then All Friends. Click Create New List and give it a name, 'Colleagues', for example. To add people to the list click on their names. Next, click Settings and then Privacy Settings. Click the drop-down arrow beside a privacy setting and select Customize. In the pop-up window, you can select who can see content, including an option for 'Specific People'. There's also a box titled 'Hide this from' where you can type in the person's name to exclude them. 3. Keep news to yourself Facebook's news feed is a digest of recent activity; yours, or your friends. If you edit your relationship status (from Married to Divorced, say), comment on a friend's photo or post a message to a group, all your friends will see this activity in their news feeds. To change the default setting for your posts click Settings > Privacy Settings > Profile Information and look for the Post By Me option. From the drop-down menu, select who will be able to see your posts - from friends, friends of friends, to everyone or customiseit to restrict it to certain people. Regardless of your default setting, you can adjust the privacy setting for each and every post you make. Before you share your post, click on the lock icon.From the drop-down menu, select who can see this post. 4. Who's asking the questions? A popular Facebook distraction is its wide variety of games, polls and quizzes. By signing up to these applications, you're giving the people who developed it permission to access personal profile information that has been made visible to everyone. You can avoid this by not using the Everyone option in your Privacy Settings. However, your details are still at riskif your friends also use these applications. To solve this, go to Settings> Privacy Settings and select Applications and Websites. Click the Edit Settings tab next to What your friends can share about you. Untick all the fields you don't want sharedin this situation, such as your profile, picture,and photographs. 5. Search results Facebook members can search for you and then add you as a friend. They can also view your profile photo and friends list or even send you a message. This allows long-lost friends to find you online, but you may also receive communications from strangers. You can edit and restrict how your search result looks so that only minimal information is displayed. To do this, click on Settings and then Privacy Settings. Click Search and under Facebook Search Results choose who you want to find you in a search. If you choose Everyone but don't want your listing to appear on external search engines like Google, make sure the box Allow indexing next to Public Search Results is unticked. 6. Share photographs Facebook is a great way to share your pictures but you may wish to restrict who can see them. To do this, click on Settings> Privacy Settings. Click on Profile Information and then the Edit Settings tab next to Photo Albums. Click the down arrows beside your individual albums to restrictwho sees them. Others may post and tag images of you to their own Facebook accounts that you'd prefer weren't made public. To remove the tag (the text that identifies you in the photograph) go to the photograph and click remove tag. This doesn't remove the photograph but it does disassociate it from your name. 7. Keep tabs on your name The easy way to find out what information others can see about you is to search for your name. You can also set up a Google alert for your name. You'll be emailed when new information appears online. Go to www.google.com/alerts to set one up and choose how regularly you wish to receive the alert - once a week should be enough. Be aware that if you have a common name it's likely that you'll receive a lot of false positives. 8. Read the small print Read social networking sites' privacy policies regularly to see how they're using your information. Facebook's policy is at www.facebook.com/policy.php?ref=pf.Go to Settings > Account Settings then click the Facebook Ads tab to see how the site could be using information about you. 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