One of the things I did a long time ago was establish my privacy settings in Facebook. It took a bit of work, but in the end I feel I have more control over who sees what from my profile. Both my husband and a close friend of mine recently commented on how they were frustrated with Facebook because they didn’t want everyone seeing all their information. So it occurred to me that there were people out there that didn’t know how to set up their privacy settings. So with the new Facebook policy that was recently announced, you really should be establishing your privacy settings. You’ll see quickly why below.

The following is a small tutorial to help you sift through the privacy settings (in plain English) Of course the screen-shots may change over time (depending when you find this post) but from what I can tell once they are set up Facebook won’t mess with them.

First thing you will need to do is go to the Friends page (top left) and decide what kind of friend groups you want to create. Notice if you haven’t already you should create a Limited Profile Friend group (we’ll assign permissions here in a sec) After you have all of your groups created you will need to go through all of your friends and assign them to 1 or more groups (yes I know this will take some time, but once it’s done you will be much more organized)

After you have set up all of your friend groups. Go to Settings -> Privacy Settings -> Profile Information.

From here choose any Facebook area, such as Basic Information and click Custom in the drop down box. You will see the option to exclude groups and for me that group is titled Limited Profile. One thing I would like to bring attention too is the Posts By Me category. I believe this is a new category with the new Facebook policy and thus it is defaulting to have Everyone see what you post. This means all of the following will be seeing by people that are not your friends (ie search engines, companies, old boyfriends, you get the idea): Default setting for Status Updates, Links, Notes, Photos, and Videos you post. So you will need to go into your privacy settings and set this to My Friends or whatever category you have created to limit access to what you post. By the way this was very seeky of Facebook to do this…bad facebook bad!

After you have set all of your Privacy settings up, check out your home page. You can click on each friend category to see only the status updates from those people you’ve organized in your friend groups.