Nowadays, people probably are becoming more comfortable telling the world at large about more and different parts of their lives. But it doesn’t mean it's ok to take away peoples' choices and force them to make public some of their information all the time. Facebook became a huge success on that premise and ought to be able to continue to thrive without doing a 180-degree turn on privacy.
More than millions, tens or hundreds of millions of people around the world have reason to limit visibility of their personal information from the web but still want to be able to share that information with trusted contacts. But privacy doesn't mean secrecy. Therefore, people need to know about privacy settings to monitor their social networking presence effectively.
Have a look at the answer of what really happens on Facebook in this video below before thinking of making some changes for your Facebook profile.
Facebook's continuous security problems make its users not happy. Among its 400 million users, many have been threatening to delete their account due to the security and privacy issues that keep surfacing. Most of the complaints are stemming from the older users, mostly aged over 35.
So how to control things, not to end it up? These are some Facebook’s basic privacy settings, which could help to avoid threats caused by the public to your personal life
- Grouping friends into lists (using “tags”) to apply specific privacy policies to them.
- Remove yourself from Facebook search results. There are numerous reasons you may not want to be found by others on Facebook.
- Remove yourself from Google. If you want to be easy to find, making your search profile can be a great idea. However, many other people may feel unpleasant when everyone can “google” their name and comes out which every single aspects of their personal life on different social networking sites.
- Make your contact information private. Frequently people we don’t know end up contacting us and we have no idea how they got our contact information. So it is better to public your contacts to people you want to share only.
- Avoid the infamous photo/video tag mistake. You let loose for a few hours one night (or day) and photos (or videos) of the moment are suddenly posted for all to view, not just your close friends who shared the moment with you and the result can be devastating.
- Protect your albums. By setting specific privacy on them , you will ensure that the only people that can view your photos are the ones who you really want them to see.
- Prevent stories from showing up in your friends’ news feeds. Sometimes it is not good to let all of your friends and business contacts hear that you just break up with your girlfriend or are in any new relationship
- Protect against published application stories. Frequently, a news feed item is immediately published to your profile when you add an application. But it is unsure that your professional contacts are interested in seeing “Nick just published to the world that he is having sex!” after your visit to a so-called “Have sex” application.
- Avoid embarrassing wall posts. Just because you use Facebook for business doesn’t mean your friends do. That’s why once in a while a friend of yours will come post something embarrassing or not necessarily “work friendly” and it can end up having adverse effects.
- Keep your friendships private. It’s often a good policy to turn off your friends’ visibility to others to avoid people make use of your friends’ profile for different purposes while some of your friends may not want to live public lives.
All in all, the best way to prevent embarrassing items from showing up on Facebook in the future is to not make bad judgments in your personal life. We’re all human though and being completely paranoid about every choice you make is probably not the best way to live your life. Be aware of what privacy settings are available and be conscious of what your friends may be publishing about you.
In the worst situation, when your online presence is turning bad, there are some websites could provide solution to delete your existing social networking profiles and virtual friends such as Web 2.0 Suicide Machine or Seppukoo.com or DeleteYourAccount.com. However these sites are facing the social network giant Facebook’s strong protest. Whatever it happens, they still receive a lot of visitors and do many “deleting” actions each day. Hopefully everything goes well with your social networking experience, so you do not need to visit these sites. Good luck!