How To: Change your Facebook Privacy Settings

If it seems to you that everybody these days is on Facebook, that’s because, well, everyone is. More than 350 million people in fact, enough to make the popular social networking site bigger than most nations.

But with Facebook’s massive popularity has come new problems. It happened because of recent privacy changes Facebook made that users may not realize leaves their personal details exposed for the world to see,

You may think only your Facebook friends can see your postings, pictures and status updates. But changes Facebook made to its privacy policy in December have left the lives of many people an open book. Unless you have opted out, Facebook now has the right to publicize your private information.

Here’s how to change it: On your profile page, put your mouse on the settings link up on the top right and select “privacy settings” from the drop down menu. (Check the video below to see the steps I describe) in action)

Click the “Profile Information” tab and go through all the choices. On the drop down box on the right, select the option that shows your info to “only Friends.” Do this for all the choices.

One more thing… under Privacy Settings…see the “Search” option at the bottom? Uncheck the “Allow” box next to the “Public Search Results” option. That will keep anything that is publically shared out of the search engines so, unless you authorize it, snooping strangers can’t find your Facebook choices.

Meantime, you can find me on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/mwendland and on twitter at http://twitter.com/pcmike