Facebook recently changed its privacy settings yet again, making the site (ironically) less private for users. Here’s a guide on how professionals can safeguard their profiles following the new changes.
(Photo Credit: Max Klingensmith/Flickr)
Facebook announced that it will be sunsetting the “Who can look up your timeline by name?” feature that gave users the option to control who could find them on the social networking site through Graph Search. Why the change? According to Facebook, the eliminated setting made Facebook’s search feature feel broken at times and users reportedly couldn’t locate people that they personally knew through the site’s search box. Or maybe this is another way for the social networking site to capitalize on its users’ usage data and make a pretty penny off of that — but we digress.
Whatever the case may be, the important thing for professionals to consider is how the recent change affects their online reputations, and also how to ensure that their future posts don’t end up costing them their careers.
What’s Changed
You can still manage who sees your profile and shares content, but it’s a bit more complicated to keep your online life under lock and key. After the recent change, users must now edit individual privacy settings to allow shared content to be viewed by the following categories:
- Only Me = no one else can find it in search
- Friends = friends will see it in their search results
- Public = anyone who searches for it can find it
Protecting Your Profile
In order to thoroughly protect your Facebook profile, select the audience you wish to share particular posts with individually. Navigate to your privacy settings and choose individual audiences for each category of content you share.
Everything you post on your profile, including what is posted to your wall, can be managed individually. Here are a few ways to manage your profile:
1. Control who can see the content posted on your timeline.
2. Control who can see posts by your friends on your timeline.
3. Control who can see posts and photos you’re tagged in on your timeline.
4. Turning on “Timeline Review” and how it saves your you-know-what.
5. Limit the audience for older post on your timeline.
It’s important to understand exactly how these privacy settings expose your personal information that you may not want potential employers viewing during the hiring process. Take a few moments to review your Facebook profile settings so that you can be 100 percent sure that your chances at your dream job aren’t jeopardized by a foolish “public” post.
To find out more about how you can take control of your Facebook privacy settings, take a look at the video below as well as the information page on search privacy:
Tell Us What You Think
How else do you keep your personal and professional life separate online? Share your thoughts on Twitter or in the comments section below.
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