Facebook introduces Enhanced Privacy Setting Features

The primary concern of all social networking websites is security. Facebook has often sparked controversies involving transparency of its privacy settings. With more and more features being incorporated in Facebook, users have been at wit’s end trying to manage privacy settings of all the new additions. Your photos, your personal information and all the data you value about yourself are up in your Facebook, if not apparently in the profile, then embedded somewhere in the different features and apps. So after the new Timeline, Facebook’s new enhanced privacy settings feature is a welcome change.

Who Can See My Stuff?

This is often a concern we feel when browsing Facebook. We have friends and they have friends and in the big web of users, you never know who stumbles across your profile. The big question is, do you want any Facebook user to see personal information in your profile? Ideally, we want only our friends to see personal stuff, but some part of your profile will be available to unknown users. With the enhanced privacy settings, this selective display of your profile is possible. You can set ‘Who can see my future posts?’ to ‘Friends’. This can be updated from your homepage as well. You can use the Activity Log to review all tagged posts. To see what others see on your Timeline, try the ‘View As’ feature.

Who Can Contact Me?

The new filter can now help you choose who sends you messages more efficiently than the old ‘Who can send you Facebook messages’ setting. Under ‘Whose messages do I want filtered into my Inbox?’, you can select Basic Filtering, which is recommended. It lets your friends and ‘people you may know’ send you messages. Or you can also select Strict Filter which lets only friends send you messages. You can also choose ‘Everyone’ or ‘Friends of Friends’ in the ‘Who can send me friend requests’ section.

How Do I Stop Someone From Bothering Me?

Every Facebook user has had his fair share of unwanted people stalking their profiles or disturbing at odd hours. You can now block any such person to un-friend them and prevent them from seeing your Facebook Timeline.

Who Can Add Things to My Timeline?

You can select ‘Friends’ or ‘No one’ in the ‘Who can post on your timeline’ section to prevent unwanted messages. You can also turn the tagging review feature on so that you can approve a tagged post or picture before it goes up in your timeline.

How Can I Manage Tags People Add and Tagging Suggestions?

You can customize who can see posts you are tagged in. You can also turn off the tag suggestions so that people aren’t prompted to tag your when they upload a picture that looks like you.

With these new privacy features, Facebook is no doubt a safer website. However, in order to fully utilize all of them, you need to be able to customize all the settings so that they give you maximum security.