Guest Post By Piyush Paliwal
If you haven’t read How Facebook Updates Are Dangerous For Your Job then read it and come back or if done then continue reading this article. Even you could have been easily in that situation, so I am going to review all the privacy settings options which would best work out for you to avoid such situations. More precise to say, a situation where you want to manage safe facebook connections with your friends and co-workers.
To start on, you need to first categorize your friends into say ‘Friends’, ‘Family’, ‘Work’ or whatever name you find fit. You will have to create a list of each of the above mentioned category, for this just click the ‘Friends’ link in the left column of your facebook homepage and then you will find a button named ‘+ Create a List’ as shown in the image below.
On clicking the button a dialog box will appear wherein you will have to write the name of the list and select the friends whom you want to include in that list, in the end click create list button at the bottom of the dialog box. You will have to repeat the above steps for all the categories of your friends.
Once you are through with creating the lists, we need to alter the privacy settings in such a way that all your personal contact information can be seen by just ‘work’ and ‘family’ people. To do this, you will have to navigate to the privacy settings.
You will find these settings under the account tab in the top right corner of your homepage. Take a look at the privacy settings button in the screenshot
Once you are in the privacy settings, click on ‘Profile Information’ and it will show you all the information which you can show / hide from you profile.
Suppose you don’t want to let ‘Work’ people see you ‘Birthday’, then just click the drop down adjacent to Birthday label and select customize from it.
On clicking the customize button, a new dialog box will appear which will have two options viz “Make this visible to” and “Hide this From”.
Select ‘Only Friends’ in ‘Make this visible to’ and under ‘Hide this From’, type the name of list or the name of the person from which you want to hide the information, which in our case is ‘Work’.
Similarly go through all the labels and make the appropriate changes. The same applies for the ‘Photo Albums’ label which you see in the ‘Profile Information’.
If you have followed the tutorial correctly till here then your ‘work’ people will see a different profile than your ‘family’ or ‘friends’ and this is what we wanted.
One more thing worth noting is that, you can even set who sees the ‘Status Update’ you post. This is done in the similar fashion as shown above.
While writing the update in the dialog box, you will see a small lock icon along with the ‘share’ button as shown in the screenshot.
once you click the ‘lock’, you will be presented with a drop down menu which contains four different settings viz
- Everyone – Everyone who opens up your profile, it doesn’t matter if he/she is logged into facebook or is your friend.
- Friends of Friends – The update will be shown to the people who are in friends of your friends.
- Only Friends – The update will be shown only to those people who are your friends on facebook.
- Customize – Here you can select individual person who sees the update.
Select ‘Customize’ from the drop down menu and you will be presented with the ‘Custom Privacy’ dialog box which we had seen above and make the changes in the similar fashion.
By following these simple steps you can share whatever you want to on Facebook without worrying about anything. Now, your close friends and colleagues will get only your selected updates and selected information.
If you really liked this short tutorial then please use the buttons below to share and follow me on twitter @piyushp_20
About the author
Piyush Paliwal is a 20 year old Computer Science Engineering student who loves to stay in touch with latest happenings in the social networking and technology. In his free hours he usually designs and develops WordPress based blogs and websites. You can connect with Piyush on Twitter and Facebook
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it's good…well done…!!!
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