Facebook greeted its users with new settings this week effectively ending any and all stalking powers society collectively enjoyed. Well, assuming we users actually make the changes.
Book Founder Mark Zuckerberg opened up his profile to the public to support the new privacy settings, even if it was rumored accidental. Just because he did doesn’t mean you’re as obligated; though we’d really appreciate it if you could leave those holiday party photos unlocked for just a few more days … We’ve never seen that done with a bottle of Jack and a ferret, either.
We digress. Welcome to the (surprisingly serious) Bewildered Society guide to protecting your Facebook privacy and digital identity. We’re breaking down the new settings to give you a better understanding of what the hell you should do if you’re trying to hide those questionable college photos from your soon-to-be-boss.
It’s likely you’ve already encountered the following options screen from Facebook this week:
At the previously linked story above explains, there is some concern for Facebook’s “recommended” settings in the above screen. The argument: It’s asking you to share more than you ever did while making it seem like you’re locking more down. Best bet here? Leave everything as “Old Settings” and manually tour the new privacy settings area yourself. You can access that new area from the Facebook navigation area under the “Settings” drop-down menu.
The new Facebook privacy tools are divided into 5 categories:
- Profile info
- Contact info
- Applications and external websites
- Searches
- Block list
We’ll examine the first 4 in detail. The 5th is pretty self-explanatory, add anyone you want to keep away from your Facebook life to the list and as far as they’re considered, you aren’t even on Facebook.
It is worth your time to go through all of your privacy options, section by section, line by line. The last thing you want to find out a year from now is that you’ve been inadvertently sharing the pictorial evidence of your 21st birthday with the world.
Profile Information
Decide who can view the basic information in your profile, such as your “about me”, your birthday, etc. You do this by clicking on the drop down menu on the right side of the screen.
Some interpretations of the above options:
- “Everyone” will share that particular information with essentially everyone on the internet. Think carefully before choosing this option.
- “Friends and Networks” will share with everyone you’re friends with, AND everyone in all of your networks (your school, work, etc.) That’s still a wide web.
- “Friends of Friends” will share with everyone you’re friends with AND all of their friends.
- “Only Friends” shares with your peeps and your peeps alone.
- The “Custom” option allows you to select specific friends and/or specific networks to share the data with, as well as the opportunity to block certain people from this particular information.
Another vital component of the Profile Information section are photo albums settings. The setting for photos and videos of you tagged by others works the same as the rest of the items. The settings for photo albums that you have uploaded yourself are more complicated:
Clicking “edit settings” for Photo Albums takes you to a page which lists all of your albums individually. For each album you can select who can view the photos using the same “everyone”, “my networks and friends”, etc. scheme explained above.
Again, you have the option of setting custom settings for each album. The custom settings menu allows you to choose specifically who (if anyone) can view the photos either by individuals or entire networks.
Contact Information
This section works similarly to the Profile Information section, it lists individual contact information, and allows you select who can see each. Again there is a “Custom” option that allows you to fine tune specifically who can or cannot view any particular information.
Applications and Websites
This section allows you to determine which Facebook applications and external websites are allowed to access what information in your profile, and what information they are allowed to publish to your newsfeed. However tedious, it is worthwhile to examine every application and website one by one to make sure the settings are what you really want.
The applications and websites settings section is divided into 4 sections. 
“What You Share” will present you with a list of all the applications currently active with your profile, and you can go down that list and decide what each application can do. This includes details like who can see that you have the application installed, whether it appears as a “tab” along the top of your profile, as well as what (if anything) it can publish to your newsfeed. An example of that window:
HERE’S A BIG ONE: “What Friends Can Share” lets you select what applications that your friends are using can access from your profile. It is a long list of potential data, so think carefully. This may be the most underestimated tool in terms of importance.
Search Settings
The ability to kill your search-ability is not a brand new feature, but it’s something many users overlooked when it launched. As with the other privacy settings, this screen lets you choose who (everyone, friends, friends of friends, etc.) will be able to find you when they search your name or email address on Facebook. Additionally, you can decide whether you want your Facebook profile to appear in results when someone Googles your name.
[Dave Studinski contributed to this post.]
