New Facebook Privacy Settings: How to decipher

The New Facebook Privacy Settings and how they affect you

It seems like every time Facebook makes a change to their privacy policies or security settings, someone throws a fit about how it reflects a reduction in personal privacy and how Facebook is eventually going to own your life. But the world’s most popular social networking site just rolled out a new privacy feature and no one is complaining – in fact, this is the least I’ve heard about a Facebook change in years. The reason: they’ve made something intuitive and easy-to-understand that allows you to take control of your privacy.

If you haven’t noticed it, or haven’t logged into Facebook in a while over concerns about privacy, we’ve prepared a brief tutorial that explains what’s going on.

“Who can see my stuff?”

There are three options here: Who can see your future posts, a review of all your activity, and an option to see your personal page as any one of your friends.

The first is the same option that has been right below the status box for a while. You can edit this field if there’s a friend or employer that you don’t want to be privy to your social life. You can change it every time you post, but this allows you to set a policy from here on out.

The second option is new and allows you to see everything going on about you that people can see. It shows you your statuses, your likes, your tagged photos, and the security settings for each. If you see some content that you’d like to hide from the world, or just from specific people, you can change it from here.

“Who can contact me?”

If you’re receiving a lot of unsolicited messages, you can change this option from the default “basic filtering” to “strict filtering,” which only puts messages from friends in your inbox. All others will go to the well-hidden “other” box.

You can also change who can send you friend requests. Change it to “friends of friends” if you don’t want requests out of the blue.

“How do I stop someone from bothering me?”

As a last resort, you can block a user here if you’re getting tired of seeing them around the site, or if they just won’t leave you alone. In the second case however, you might just want to report them to Facebook. If they’re truly being abusive, their account may be suspended.

That’s really all there is to the new privacy settings. This most recent update has achieved its perennial goal of simplifying complex options for any users of the site. Have any more questions? Feel free to ask us at http://www.callnerds.com/blog!