Best practices for protecting yourself online|10 Facebook Privacy setting tips

Are you a FB user? Then this article is a must for you. You are sharing your private information, your family & personal photos. What will happen if you come to know that these things are viewed to people you don’t want? Good knowledge of Facebook privacy settings fine-tunes the privacy of your photos, your status updates, and other important stuffs. Facebook’s privacy policy almost covers all the little issues of your account that matters to you. Even you can manage things to that extent that you yourself can’t even believe. But what matters the most is that you must have the sufficient knowledge of these settings.Another important fact is these settings are not permanent. Facebook always make changes to it settings & looks. Facebook has its own default privacy settings for its users which are not adequate.So, read this article very carefully & be a master of Facebook.

1.     Profile editing:

Editing your FB profile is the most important thing. You shouldseclude your personal information like your date of birth, your address, your contact number and stuff. So, in your privacy setting, select “friends” in place of “public”. This is a kind of primary safeguard. Here you can also make your profile visible to some selected people & even you can restrict some particular people from viewing your profile contents.

2.     Remove yourself from Facebook & Google search results:

Most of us want keep our personal life secret due to various reasons. This will be useful to them. To make yourself unavailable in the Facebook search you have to go through the following path.

                                 Privacy setting ->How you connect

There are several options available. You can manage them according to your wish.

Some people enjoy when they find themselves searching in some search engines. But, sometimes it puts you in someserious problems. So it is always a better option to make you unavailable in the search engines. This can be done by removing yourself from the index of the search engines. Do this by simply unchecking the box of Public search result. The path for this is given below.

Privacy setting ->Apps & websites-> Edit setting ->Public search-> Edit setting

3.     Avoid the notorious photo tagging:

Sometimes people get their relationships in some kind of problems just due to the photos of Facebook they are tagged in. Here you may blame their trust on themselves but still this factor is responsible. Though there are several ways to overcome these factors but the simplest way is to avoid showing compromising photos to friends. The path is as follows.

Privacy setting -> custom->only me

Remember, this will block all people from viewing any images or videos that you’ve been tagged in. Though many Facebook users want their friends to see the photos they’ve been tagged in.

4.     Protect your personal album& existing photos:

You should make your photos and albums private. You will never want to share your private photos with all the people, with friends neither in some cases. So it’s an essential step to make those things private or available to only friends. You can even set privacy per album. Isn’t it great?

5.     Restrict your apps to use your information:

It’s important to understand what of your information applications can access. The more restrictive you make your profile settings, the less information that’s available to applications.

6.     Make your contact private:

So many people use Facebook for their professional as well as personal use.  When someone starts approving friend requests from the people not having strong relationships, then it becomes more important to limit the visibility of contact details.

7.     Avoid frustrating posts on your timeline:

Sometimes you check your Facebook account, hoping that there will be funny comments on your wall or a picture comment telling you how pretty you are or see a friendrequest.  But what you see is just weird. Another thing is, you just saw a post of your friend showing something exceptional or may be vulgar and when you tried to hide it just posted on your timeline. Avoid these kinds of posts.

8.     Keep your friends’ list private:

Some of us want to show thehuge number of friends they have or how famous they are on internet. But some just don’t because of some genuine reasons. Because sometime one of your friends just opens your friend list and send friend request to someone anonymously, it may be your girlfriend’s name or your sister’s. So, protect your friend list.

Go to find friends -> Manage friend list -> Edit

9.     Instant personalization:

This is a service that lets third-party websites to personalize your experience. It allows access to your personal data which is harmful.It also let you see relevant information about your friends when you arrive on the partner websites. It is similar to how News feed surfaces the people and things you care about.Instant personalization helps you find friends and interesting content on other websites. They've partnered with a few companies, like Pandora, Bing, Yelp, Rotten Tomatoes, Clicker, Scribd, Docs &TripAdvisor, to make these sites more fun and useful the moment you arrive. They impress you by immediately playing the music you like or displaying friends' reviews or stuff.

10.  Enabling “HTTPS” or Secure browsing:

Here you can set up secure browsing or login alerts. “Secure browsing” browse Facebook securely when possible. It sends you a mail when you are logged in from a new computer or device. When someone hacks into your account or data no privacy setting in this world can protect you. While enabling https service, you can make thing harder for someone connected to the same network to hack your password or data. “HTTPS” is useful to online security on all web services not just Facebook.