Secure your Facebook with proper privacy settings

MySpace recently has announced plans to simplify its privacy settings as it seeks to differentiate itself from social network rival Facebook, which is under fire over its privacy practices and recent privacy breaches due to facebook bugs.

Myspace said "We provide clear privacy settings, allowing not only restrictions on who can view their profile data, but also age restrictions to allow age separation of older and younger users.". The new Facebook features introduced last month include the ability for partner websites to incorporate Facebook user data, a move that would further expand the social network’s presence on the internet.

Securing your facebook with settings -  A few key things to understand about friend lists:

• You can add each of your friend to more than one Friend List
• Friend Lists can have specific privacy applied to them

Your friends’ privacy settings will always default to the most restrictive friend list they’ve been placed in. For example, let’s say your friend John is someone you met at work but continue to hang out with outside of work. You may have placed them in your “Work Contacts” Friend List and your “Local Friends” Friend List. If your “Work Contacts” cannot see photos you’ve been tagged in and your “Local Friends” can, John will not be able to see photos you’ve been tagged in.

You can configure your Friend Lists by visiting the friends area of your Facebook.

Read the Facebook Guide to Privacy

At the very bottom of every page on Facebook, there’s a link that reads "Privacy." The linked page is "A guide to privacy on Facebook," which contains the latest privacy functions and policies. For example, with the latest changes in December 2009, Facebook discloses what it calls "Publicly available information." This is information that is publicly viewable to anyone visiting your profile, and includes sensitive information like your name, current city and gender.

When in doubt, use the "How others see you" tool on Facebook’s privacy guide to check and make sure your privacy settings are properly set.

Facebook’s new simple privacy settings page wants you to make all your posts and photos visible to the whole Web by default.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Show "limited friends" a cut-down version of your profile

You can choose to make people ‘limited friends’ who only have access to a cut-down version of your profile if you wish. This can be useful if you have associates who you do not wish to give full friend status to, or feel uncomfortable sharing personal information with.

If you’re not sure whether you’ve sufficiently protected what you share on Facebook, thenReclaimPrivacy.org has a bookmarklet to help you be as private as you’d like.

To run the bookmarklet and see how private you may or may not be on Facebook, simply follow these directions:

1. Drag this link to your web browser bookmarks bar: Scan for Privacy
2. Log in to facebook.com and then click that bookmarklet
3. You will see a series of privacy scans that inspect your privacy settings and warn you about settings that might be unexpectedly public.

For each area, ReclaimPrivacy will give you a green ("good"), yellow ("caution"), or red ("insecure") ranking. If you hit yellow or red, it’ll provide you with specific steps to fix the problem so you don’t have to waste time searching for the right setting.

I YOU STILL HAVE ANY CONCERNS  you can go tot face book privacy settings  page  on face book itself to see what you can  do to make your facebook more secure

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