With over 500 million users and 176 billion ads shown on Facebook during Q1 2010, Facebook is now both a huge social media network and a booming economy for many companies. This means you have to be careful about how you use Facebook. While they depend on their users, they also depend on showing you ads. And by they, I mean Facebook, application developers, advertisers etc.
Here are 13 tips to make your Facebook experience more secure and enjoyable so you don’t have to worry too much about using Facebook.
1. Change your password regularly – or at least have a secure password consisting of both upper- and lowercase letters as well as numbers and special characters as ! or “. Consider replacing letters with numbers, for example the letter “e” can be replaced with “3”, and so on. Don’t use your Facebook password anywhere else than Facebook. Facebook is a likely to be a huge attraction for hackers.
2. Avoid using the applications – or at least check’em out before you allow them to pull all your personal information, because that’s what they do. Also do NOT get tempted by scam applications such as “so many people visited your profile last week” etc., the application cannot know that – at least not until it has been running on your profile for a certain period of time, then it might be able to. Even worse are the applications/pages where you have to join/like in order to gain access to see what a celebrity looked like 20 years ago etc. They are not designed to do anything else but to get you signed up so they can get your data and send you advertisements.
3. Just like many applications, advertisements can be designed to pull your data if you participate in them, be it contests etc. It’s okay to click on the advertisements if you find it interesting, but as always, think before acting, especially if you’re asked to sign up.
4. Consider what you want to do with your Facebook profile when it comes to co-workers. Do you really want your boss, or co-workers, to know exactly what you did last week when you called in sick? If you must be friends with people from your workplace, create a separate friend list to put them on and restrict what information they can see about you – such as photos and status updates.
5. Not only co-workers shouldn’t be able to see everything you post. Adjust your privacy settings as secure and strict as possible, so your profile is not wide open to the world and all “friends of friends”.
6. Before publishing content, ask yourself what will happen if it goes public. A picture of you and your partner only visible to certain friend lists might still be downloaded by somebody and uploaded somewhere else – it’s a long shot, but it happens. It’s also not uncommon these days, for a new boss to look you up on Facebook before hiring you – they’ll also Google you.
7. Consider deleting photos and information that are no longer relevant.
8. You don’t have to wear a tin foil hat to use this tip, but it might help. Consider creating another e-mail account only for Facebook, in case hackers get access to your profile or Facebook in general. Or even more likely, an application will pull it and start e-mailing you with offers you don’t want – it’s better to get it on a free webmail account that can handle it, other than your personal e-mail account where it easily gets too annoying.
9. Depending on how you use your Facebook profile, consider if it’s necessary to post your home address and mobile/phone number. In most cases, the people you befriend on Facebook will already know this – and if they don’t, there’s probably a reason, so let’s keep it that way.
10. Do NOT publish photos of others or their information unless they’ve said it’s okay. Be sure to check with the local laws in your country about posting photos on the Internet if they contain other people.
11. Help make Facebook’s terms & conditions better by participating in their Bill of Rights and Responsibilities group.
12. If you’re unsatisfied with the terms & conditions, you can e-mail [email protected] – but don’t hold your breath.
13. Had enough of Facebook? Use this link to delete your account (it requires you to login first).
… and finally, don’t forget to join TechPatio’s Facebook page. There’s no harm in doing that, it’s just an easy way for you to stay updated and get notified about new articles on TechPatio.com 🙂
These are great tips. Thanks for being dofollow and congratulations on a year of being on the web, I have a long way to go and a lot of work to do!
Thanks Ashley and thanks for stopping by and leaving a comment.
There’s one thing I’m wrestling with: Should bloggers get a second Facebook account for their blogging life? I have a fan page for each of my sites, so that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about I’d like to “Like” TechPatio and others, but I don’t want my mean old aunt whoever to see all the things I do in the blogging world.
And I guess I’d like to interact with other bloggers without them seeing my mean old aunt whoever, too! 🙂 I tried making a FB account with my first name and last initial, but it objected – guess there’s no such thing as a one-letter last name.
Hi Christie. I know what you mean. But I don’t think Facebook allows for users to have multiple (personal) accounts, so I don’t think it’s possible. Until Facebook comes up with a way to hide your “likes” from your profile, there’s probably not much else to do than to stick with what you like and be proud of it – or don’t show you like it 🙂 Or maybe there’s already a privacy setting to completely hide “likes”? It’s hard to keep up with Facebook these days when it comes to such settings.
Changing passwords frequently, protecting against apps fraud are really important tips. Thanks for the 13 tips…. Nice work.
Dear Klaus, I always tell my readers that, security is not complete without own consciousness like you. Any way thanks for sharing.
Thanks for these great tips, Klaus! The one with changing password frequently is quite to be remembered.
Facebook is awesome social media site to include our any kind of profile and we can do marketing on the site where we will huge traffic. Huge traffic result on high page rank to the website.