A Few Facebook tips and tricks – for those who like some privacy!

Thinking about privacy and looking around me I found that it might be good to have a little tutorial on a few of the settings available in the most common of social networks (to date). It also, despite a lot of flak, does have fairly advanced privacy controls.

I like the Google+ way of doing this, and it’s easier to explain:
You have circles. When you post about your drunken antics on the weekend, you choose to share this with your “Closest Friends” circle. When you make a general statement, you choose to make it public and when you create a limited, non shareable post, well that’s a private message, not that dissimilar to an email…

On facebook you can have circles as well, but it’s more difficult:

• First, get to the core of your privacy settings:
  
  

  This is how you get to the privacy settings page.
  
  

  Nearly got there, just one more step!
  
  

  next step
• Here is where you can get into the privacy settings for each individual type of information
  
  

  penultimate step
  
  

  at this point, very little information is available externally
  So, by following these steps, what we’ve done is created an online locker to store digital data about ourselves, where very little information is available from the outside. This is the way we live in everyday life, so no different than what we already do anyway.
• Now lets go to our friends list
  
  

  get to friends
• You next have to assign each person to a “list”, the Facebook equivalent of a Google+ Circle. Much like you would think of everyone in your life.
  
  

  here is where you can classify your facebook friends
• Now you can go back to the Privacy settings piece and “only show” every type of information to a specific set of lists. For instance, only your close friends can have access to your phone number and home address, but all your acquaintances and colleagues can know your University and date of birth
• Finally, when making a new post or a creating a new album, use the privacy control and decide who you will be showing it to.
  
  

  new post privacy controls

There, hope that helped