Avoid Facebook Disasters

Ignoring Facebook's privacy options -- some of them fairly new and not well-known -- can trip up the social-networking site's users in a number of ways. Here are some hypothetical stories that everyone who has a Facebook account should be aware of.

Note: Take a look at this Privacy Watch column for another discussion of privacy on Facebook. And if you have a Facebook account, you may have a Twitter account as well. See our companion article on avoiding Twitter disasters.

The disaster: Ann played hooky from work, calling in sick, and spent the day sunbathing, updating her Facebook status on her laptop all the while. The next day, her boss confronted her with the evidence that she wasn't really ill, causing severe embarrassment and a reprimand (plus a day of docked pay).

The solution: In this day and age, professional and personal lives often be­­come intertwined, and Facebook can be ground zero for this. You might momentarily forget that you have "friended" your boss and that he has the same access to your ramblings on Facebook as do your real-life drinking buddies. But you can change that.

Using Facebook's Lists settings might have made the most sense for Ann. Lists, one of the newer features of Facebook, allow you to organize people into groups and then assign each group different levels of access to your information on Facebook.

Lists let you set who can see what on your profile. For example, if you've added someone as a friend but aren't sure about him, you can relegate him to a list that you name "Limited Profile," which will limit how much of your profile that person may view and interact with. You can also create lists for work, school, special projects or anything else, but by default the lists don't change how your profile displays.

To work with Lists, click the Friends button (top bar) and +Create in the left column under Lists --or just put people on any list by using the "Add to list" drop-down menu next to their name.

Next, you need to specify how much of your information members of each list can see. To do this, visit the Privacy Settings page (hover over "Settings" in the top right of the screen, and click Privacy Settings inside the box that pops up; or go to www.facebook.com/privacy), then select Profile. Here, select Customize... from the drop-down menu next to whichever section you'd like, and type the name of the list in the box under "Except These People." For Ann, dropping her workmates into a "work" list and dialing down that group's access to the bare minimum would have saved her a lot of trouble. Specifically, she should change the "Status and Links" setting so as to exclude the Limited Profile list. (Note, however, that updates to your profile from third-party applications are generally not blocked by these privacy settings.)

With Facebook's recently announced status publisher upgrade (now in beta), you will (or will soon) see an option (a gray lock with a drop-down menu) letting you control who sees these updates on an individual basis. For broad posts, "Everyone" will let the whole world (including Google and other off-Facebook locations) see the update. For more sensitive posts you can change the setting to "Friends" -- or use fine-grained control through "Custom," restricting the post to be visible only to certain friend lists.

The disaster: Getting far away from ex-boyfriend Bob wasn't the main reason Mary moved to Pittsburgh, but it was one of the main benefits. So when Bob showed up at her new job, she was naturally disturbed. How did he find out where she was, she asked. "It was on your Facebook profile," he replied.

The solution: All users have extremely fine-grained control over what gets on their Facebook page, but few take full advantage of these features.

The controls are found in the Privacy Settings page under "Profile," reachable as outlined above. Here you'll find a list of 10 items on your profile that you can turn on or off, each to a different group of Facebook users.

"Profile" lets you choose whether to block people from seeing anything beyond the most basic information (name and network) on your profile page, while "Basic Info" allows viewing of gender, birthday, relationship status and the like. "Personal Info" opens the door a little wider -- to your "about me" section, interests and favorites, and so on; "Status and Links" controls who can see your latest status update. Most of the categories are self-explanatory (just click the question-mark icon if you need help) and can get pretty detailed. But this is also an advantage: If, like Mary, you don't want to advertise where you work, you can turn off that detail here.

Also, click Save Changes at the bottom of any Facebook settings screen, or your settings will not be updated.