Privacy Settings

Hey everybody, I'm going to be out of town all weekend, there's 87 dollars in my cookie jar, and my bank password is password. Come on, you wouldn't share all that information with everybody. But chances are, if you are not paying attention to your Facebook privacy settings, you might be doing just that. Well no worries, I'm going to reveal the tricks to not revealing too much. Life is crazy. I mean who has time to keep up with all the latest in social networking? I'm Carley Knobloch and if you stick with me, I'll show you all the tech tools you need to get socially connected. Facebook helps you share with a lot of people all at once. But if you're not managing your privacy settings, you may be sharing a lot more with a lot more people than you think. First, the basics. On your home page, you'll see this little arrow. Click on it, and you'll see where you can edit your privacy settings. The first decision you'll want to make is exactly who can see your Facebook wall. Most people allow just their friends or their friends of their friends to see what they posted. This setting can limit how much of your profile is displayed when people go searching for you. In addition to your default settings, you can also fine tune each update so you can control exactly who sees each individual post. This one is for friends only. Now here's something I really like having control over. Tagging. That's when someone takes a picture of you and thy posted it on their page. But because they tag you, it shows up on your page too. Now I'm no Diva, but I definitely don't want those pictures posted for all my friends to see. So I make sure that I get to review and give permission for pictures or posts that I've been tagged in to appear on my wall. Now it won't necessarily stop my friend from posting it on her wall, but I guess if it was really bad, I could ask her to remove it. So anyway, I'm going to decline that one, but this one that my husband took on our ski trip is good to go. Bear in mind that these are all default settings, so it's going to apply this way every time unless you change it. This is another biggie in terms of privacy. All those apps you use that link to you and access your Facebook account. If you don't go in and adjust your privacy settings, you may be allowing them to collect all sorts of data and use it in ways that you don't really want them to. So for example, I use this app all the time. And there's some basic information that they need to have access to. But then there's the optional. Uh no, I don't want them accessing my customized friend list, I don't want to be bothered by notifications, and I most definitely do not want them posting on my behalf. Now I'm not saying you shouldn't use Facebook as easy way to open up applications, it's actually pretty handy because you don't have to remember a billion passwords, but each app is different. And so you'll need to go through them one by one and edit your privacy settings. It's a little tedious but it's totally worth it. With all the privacy issues circling around the Internet, these are some easy ways to make sure that what happens on your Facebook wall stays on your Facebook wall. For more information, check out some of our other Facebook tutorials at eHow or find us on our eHow Facebook page or follow us on Twitter. Thanks for watching.