Good evening Madam Toastmaster, fellow Toastmasters and guests. This evening, I will tell you how to set your basic Privacy settings on Facebook to insure maximum privacuy & security.
When you open an account with Facebook, all the privacy settings are pre-set. Another word for these pre-set settings is “default settings”. The default settings on Facebook all follow the Facebook principle: Everything is PUBLIC, unless we change it to private. What does PUBLIC mean in this context? It means that anyone who Googles my name and finds my Facebook account online, can see everything! My profile, my posts, pictures, likes, comments, everything. I may not want this for many reasons. For example, I may not want my employer to have access to my Facebook account. If I don’t want this, I have to actively change my settings. My name, profile picture, gender and networks will always be public, but nothing else has to, if I change the settings.
In order to change my privacy setting, I go to my wall: I click on the arrow on the upper right hand side; a drop down menu appears and one of the items is Privacy Settings. I click on that.
Then I will see that the privacy setting is pre-set to Public. I change that by clicking under Friends. Now only my Facebook friends can see all my activities on FB. Custom is more advanced.
I go back to the drop down menu, and click on Account settings.
Now I get a huge menu, and I could spend an hour explaining the different account settings that can be tweaked to increase privacy. I will just point out the most important one: The second item on the left side menu is Security. I click on that and I check the box “browse facebook on a secure connection/ https. This will increase protection against hackers.
Now I go back to my wall, and I click on my name on the right hand corner. My profile will appear this way.
Here’s my profile, or Timeline, as the newer version of profiles is called. I click on Update Info to check my profile information.