Facebook's New Privacy Settings: 5 Things You Should Know

Following through on plans announced a few months ago, Facebook is rolling out changes on Wednesday to its privacy settings intended to make them simpler to adjust and understand by its 350 million end users.



However, Facebook will still let users exclude themselves from being found via Facebook's search engine and via external search engines like Google. People will also be able to limit who sends them messages and friend requests to friends and friends of friends.



There are some scams and hackers who take advantages about this changing. Because our privacy will be seen by other people even they are not FaceBook users. Here are five privacy issues you should know about as these settings roll out across Facebook :


1. Search Settings

When I checked my search settings this morning, the option to index my profile by public search engines had been turned on. This is despite the fact that I had explicitly turned off this setting when Facebook launched public search listings two years ago. If you don't want search engines like Google to index your profile, do yourself a favor and make sure those settings are still set the way you want them to be.

To adjust your search privacy settings click on Settings>Privacy Settings>Search. If the "Allow indexing" box is checked, then search engines will be able to index your information.


2. Hyper Control

While Facebook is taking away some control over publicly available information, you are getting extreme control over other parts of your Facebook profile. Now you can restrict who sees your shared content on a per-post basis. Don't want certain friends to see your latest update? No problem. Need to keep those photos of you at the bar away from your co-workers? You can do that, too.

The "everyone" option means the information is available to anyone on the Internet, even if they're not logged into FaceBook and can be indexed by external search engines. So if you want to keep your profile discreet, just change the setting to "Only Me".

3. Friends List

Although your friends list is technically set by FaceBook, you can still control who sees it. But controls for this information are found on your Facebook profile page - not your privacy settings. If you want to restrict who sees your friends list within FaceBook, click on the pencil icon next to your Friends widget below your profile picture, and uncheck the box that says "Show my friends on my profile." Or there is also option to "Always Show These Friends", etc..


Other information you can remove from your profile page includes your gender and current city.

4. Password Protection

Facebook has added a new layer of protection for changing your privacy settings. Under the new policy you will have to enter your password whenever you want to change your privacy settings. This is a smart move, and quite a common policy with other Web services.

But in my tests, this extra protection did not work very well at all. Once I had chosen to exclude my Facebook profile from public search engines, I left my privacy settings page and returned to my profile (your settings are saved automatically). But when I went back to my privacy settings, the pages were wide open with no password requirement. I tested this out on several browsers and operating systems, I also signed out and back in several times to see if that would change anything. But each time I checked my security settings were wide open. The password protection eventually came back after half an hour or so, but that was far too long. The password requirement should come back automatically or Facebook should be telling you that this setting is set to time out.


5. PAI Changes
Facebook is also changing what it deems to be publicly available information (PAI).

As it indicated in October, Facebook is also making some basic profile information publicly available, including name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, friend list and promotional "Pages" a user is a fan of. The idea is to make it easier for people to find friends, especially those with common names.



well, I will discuss more about setting your FaceBook so it will not be easy for loot thiefs to get into your account on another post.. see ya!