Five-minute Facebook security checkup | How To – CNET
Security is important and knowing your security options on your Facebook account is easy. This article from C-Net gives a quick and easy 5 minute how-to-guide.
Five-minute Facebook security checkup | How To – CNET.
Facebook has been taking a beating in the press for its disappointing financial performance and declining stock price. But reports of the social network’s death are a bit premature.
After all, a billion users is nothing to sneeze at. Even if only half that number sign into their Facebook accounts every day, as the company claims, that’s a lot of eyeballs to present ads to.
I bet not even one out of 10 Facebook users has ever changed the service’s default security settings, which make your profile information available for anyone to search and allow every other Facebook user to contact you.
Dangers of unfettered access hit home
Earlier this week my niece spent a couple of days getting rid of a Facebook stalker from Nigeria who was trying to get her to add him on her Skype account. (The Facebook help site explains how to report various types of abuse of the service.)
“Where in the world did he get my name?” she asked me. I pointed her to a post I wrote last year that described how to make Facebook more private. That post was an update to a story I wrote three years ago on the same subject.
Since Facebook regularly tweaks its security settings, both of those posts have become out-of-date. The five minutes (or less) it takes to complete the updated steps below can save you hours of aggravation caused by an encounter with a Facebook criminal–or even a well-intentioned but misinformed friend.
Get to know the inline audience selector
To open Facebook’s privacy options, click Home in the top-right corner of any Facebook page and choose Privacy Settings. Three big buttons are labeled Public, Friends, and Custom.
The Friends option is selected by default, but this is misleading because this setting applies only to posts and photos uploaded from Facebook apps that don’t have the inline audience selector, such as Facebook for BlackBerry. The audience selector appears below the status window and photos you’re about to post; it retains whichever setting you used previously (probably Friends).
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Natasja lives in Johannesburg. A born and bred South African girl and very proud of it. She loves technology and is forever looking for that new application that will simplify her life.
