Nobody Wants To See Me With My Shirt Off
A Guide to Facebook's Privacy Settings
Andrew Chang
Issue date: 1/26/10 Section: Voices
Last month, Facebook updated their privacy settings, encouraging users to share more personal information to the world. Navigating these new privacy settings has been so confusing that even Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO, had embarrassing pictures of himself at the beach made public. As MBA students in the thick of the recruiting season, it is critical that we protect our personal brands by understanding how the privacy settings work on Facebook and other social networking sites. Here are a few tips to protect your image:
Remove your profile from Google: There's rarely a reason why you should want your profile indexed in Google's search results. To disable indexing in Google, go to Settings -> Privacy Settings -> Search -> and uncheck the "Allow" box. If you don't want people to find you in the Facebook search results you can do that here as well.
Categorizing "friends": The most important tool for managing your privacy settings is making sure to categorize your "friends" into several levels. Facebook calls these categories "lists" and you can add more in the "Friends" section. You can add friends to multiple lists, but I would advise selecting one category for each person. Existing friends can be easily categorized and new friends can be categorized as you accept their friend request. The levels represent how much of your online profile each person can see. I've created 3 levels that I call: "Friends," "People I know" and "Hell No." "Friends" are my actual friends, the people I regularly hang out with and I don't mind viewing my entire Facebook profile. You don't actually need to create this group if by default anyone not in a category falls in this bucket. "People I know" are people I've met, but I wouldn't exactly call them my friend. People that regularly fall into this category include high school classmates I haven't talked to in 10 years and the girl I met at a random party one time. These are the people who will get limited access to my profile. The "Hell No" category consists of people that I reluctantly accepted as friends. People in this category, who will see nothing by my info tab, include parents, ex-girlfriends, co-workers and recruiters.
Remove your profile from Google: There's rarely a reason why you should want your profile indexed in Google's search results. To disable indexing in Google, go to Settings -> Privacy Settings -> Search -> and uncheck the "Allow" box. If you don't want people to find you in the Facebook search results you can do that here as well.
Categorizing "friends": The most important tool for managing your privacy settings is making sure to categorize your "friends" into several levels. Facebook calls these categories "lists" and you can add more in the "Friends" section. You can add friends to multiple lists, but I would advise selecting one category for each person. Existing friends can be easily categorized and new friends can be categorized as you accept their friend request. The levels represent how much of your online profile each person can see. I've created 3 levels that I call: "Friends," "People I know" and "Hell No." "Friends" are my actual friends, the people I regularly hang out with and I don't mind viewing my entire Facebook profile. You don't actually need to create this group if by default anyone not in a category falls in this bucket. "People I know" are people I've met, but I wouldn't exactly call them my friend. People that regularly fall into this category include high school classmates I haven't talked to in 10 years and the girl I met at a random party one time. These are the people who will get limited access to my profile. The "Hell No" category consists of people that I reluctantly accepted as friends. People in this category, who will see nothing by my info tab, include parents, ex-girlfriends, co-workers and recruiters.
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