There have been so many instances of confidential information being publicly accessible just because the user isn’t aware of privacy settings. One of the most widely used social networking sites is Facebook and occurrences of private posts, photos, messages being posted publicly isn’t news. In fact, there are websites that are dedicated for highlighting ‘Facebook message failures’.

While the current generation does not have any issues with uploading and posting almost every detail of their life, millions of cyber criminals are just waiting for an innocent user to slip up.  Given this scenario, securing data from public accessibility is essential.  A few minutes can save users of social networking sites and the cyberspace in general from trouble and embarrassment.

The primary step to doing so is to segment your friends into lists. This involves making groups and categorizing your friend list into say, ‘acquaintances’, ‘colleagues’, ‘close friends’, ‘family’ etc. to limit their viewing of certain features of your account for example your Wall, your photos etc. There is no limit to how large a friend list should be, every list can be as large as one likes. You can create lists on the privacy settings page.

No one will know that you have changed your privacy settings, as these updates don’t show up on your newsfeed.

Photo album settings can be changed individually, except the album ‘profile pictures’; hence one has to be careful as to what he/she uploads as their profile picture.

For removing tags, one has to hover over the story, click  and select Report/Remove Tag from the drop down menu. You can then choose to remove the tag or ask the person who posted it to take it down.

You can use the audience selector to change who can see items you share on your Timeline after you share it.

It should be kept in mind that when you share something on someone else’s Timeline, they control the audience for the post.

For advanced privacy controls visit  Facebook