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How to use Facebook's new privacy settings What can Facebook's simplified and e

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How to use Facebook's new privacy settings

What can Facebook's simplified and enhanced privacy settings do for you?



In an attempt to answer the warning shot fired from Google+ and to satisfy privacy critics, Facebook has implemented new privacy features to make your social networking more secure and manageable. You'll find easier navigation to privacy controls and a more compartmentalized approach to determining exactly who can see what from your profile, posts, and photos. Whether or not Facebook took its cue from Google+, which categorizes your friends, family, coworkers, and more into circles that let you determine who can see specific information, the social networking Goliath is giving you more control over your profile and what you share.

The many new features across the site fall under two main umbrellas: Profile and Sharing. The biggest and most noticeable addition is the new "inline audience selector" located to the right of almost everything profile- and sharing-related. Essentially, the in-line privacy feature is a drop-down box that allows you to select who gets to see what.

Facebook Inline Privacy Settings
Fitting the profile
Select Edit Profile in the upper right corner and you will see your basic information: Hometown, Current City, Birthday, Interested In, Languages, and About Me. Take note of the in-line selector to the right of each field, where you can choose which groups you want to share with: Public, Friends, Yourself, Friends of Friends, or specific people in the custom field.

Facebook Music Inline SelectorThe same approach with the same in-line privacy selector can be applied to all categories on the Edit Profile page: Friends and Family, Education and Work, Philosophy, Arts and Entertainment, Sports, Activities and Interests, and Contact Information. This way, you can decide exactly who can see your email address, what movies you like, where you work, and who is in your family.

Now that you know how to adjust the privacy settings for the personal information on your profile, you are ready to control which posts, photos, and tags appear on your profile. Instead of being notified that you have been tagged in a photo or post after it has been published to your profile, you can receive an alert that allows you to approve or deny the tag or post before it is published to your profile. To screen posts, photos, or tags, select the following: Account > Privacy Settings > How Tags Work > Change Settings > Profile Review > Turn on Profile Review.

Facebook How Tags Work Clean
To see if there are any posts or tags that need approval, simply look at the Wall icon under your profile pic for the Pending Posts text. If there are tags pending, select Pending Posts, and they will appear in the field to the right of your profile pic. Select the check mark to approve the post or tag and the X to ignore or deny it.

For more tag-specific control, revisit the How Tags Work window and edit the various fields: Profile Review, Tag Review, Profile Visibility, Tag Suggestions, and Friends Can Check You Into Places.

If you constantly find yourself in the eye of the tagging hurricane, then you can enact tagging-specific measures to lesson the burden of popularity. Just like before, you can remove a tag that someone else has posted. However, with the new privacy settings, you can take extended actions to ensure that those taggers respect your privacy in the future. Select whether the photo is harassing you or a friend, if it's spam, or if it contains unsavory features. You can remove the tag itself, message the photo owner or tagger, request that the content be taken down, or block the tagger and become invisible to each other on Facebook.

Facebook View Profile AsWhen you are done adjusting the privacy settings for your profile, go to View As... tab in the upper right-hand corner of your profile to see exactly how your profile appears to others. You are essentially looking through a window to your profile, and by doing so, you can alter it to meet your privacy specifications.

Sharing is caring
Now that you have regulated your private details, you are ready to manage how you share posts, pics, and tags. Once again, Facebook has brought the privacy settings that previously resided a few pages away and placed them right next to each post with an in-line audience selector, making it easier to share different information with different groups of people.

Like the in-line privacy tools for your profile, you can choose between Public, Friends, and Custom when you set a post live. Facebook plans to expand the amount of groups in the in-line controls with the hopes of making your target group more precise.

Facebook Custom SettingsSome of the sharing changes are subtle and deal only with language. For example, before these changes, you could share your post with Everyone, which has been jettisoned for the term Public. This way, anyone may see the post, but not everyone will see it.

With all of these changes, Facebook is really adding privacy through flexibility. You have more room to change exactly who sees what you share even after you've shared it. If you published a post about your religious views or how much you hate your job and decide that you don't want everyone to see it, you can change who does after the fact with ease. Switch from Public to Friends or single out specific people in your network who you don't want to see it ? or just remove the post entirely. All of these changes can be done from the in-line controls.

Tag ? you're it!
Tagging can be annoying, especially if you're the one being tagged. However, with the new profile controls, you can approve tags you're in before they go live on your page. But what if you're on the other side of the tagging fence? Here are some tips to become a better tagger.

It used to be that you could only tag people who were in your Facebook network, which made it difficult to add tags to people you knew but weren't friends with on Facebook. Now you can tag anyone who is on Facebook even if they aren't your Facebook friends. Be wary, though, because the same holds true for others. But you won't have to worry about that if you have set your profile to screen posts and photos that anyone has tagged you in.

Facebook Post new features
Feel inclined to update your location at any point in time? Now you can, with the new location tagging option. Update where you've been, where you are, or where you're going on your pictures, in your posts, and on your wall. Specify who you're with and where you are with the two small icons on the bottom left side of the post window. It's a way of documenting exactly what is happening or what is going to happen, and now you can do it from anywhere ? not just your mobile device.

Facebook's new privacy settings are more up front and flexible, making it easier to show and say what you want to who you want while managing how others handle your information.

Source: http://www.tecca.com/columns/how-to-facebook-privacy-settings/
 
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