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December 16, 2009

Can potential employers see your Facebook profile?

You may have noticed that Facebook has changed their privacy practices. Even though you may think you have everything set to private, you quite likely are revealing more about yourself than you thought you were as recently as a few weeks ago. Potential employers are looking up applicants' Facebook profiles, so if you haven't taken a look at your public profile, you should, and soon.

Here's what you need to do first:

Mouse over Settings > Click Privacy Settings > Click Profile Information > Click Preview My Profile

See this? This is what any Facebook user can see about you. All they have to do is search your name. Look at everything that is displaying here, click it. People very likely can see your photos, the links you post to your profile, the notes you've written, all of your friends, where you work... they don't even need to friend you to snoop on you now. You can see other examples of this by clicking the names of people who comment on your friends activity that you aren't friends with yourself. Go ahead: snoop a little bit. 

You'll likely want to change this. Here's the first thing to do:

Mouse over Settings > Click Privacy Settings > Profile Information > Change Settings. 

There's a button here that controls the privacy of every part of your profile. If it's set to Everyone, you're showing everything you got. If it's set to Friends of Friends, these things can be seen by people you're friends with - not everyone in the world, but a lot more people than you might realize (you may not be friends with your boss - or your potential boss - but you may have a friend who's friends with your boss... you get the idea). Setting it to Only Friends makes the information viewable only by the people you've added as friends. 

You'll want to check all of these individual bits of your profile, but most crucial may be the setting for your Photo Albums. If you click the Edit Settings button for Photo Albums, you'll see a list of all of your albums, and see the privacy setting for each album. You'd be surprised what is or is not set to private.

Next, I'd recommend checking out the privacy settings for all of the applications you use. These can be as innocuous as What Personality Type Am I? or Pieces of Flair, but believe it or not, Links, Notes, and Videos are all applications as well. Remember the 25 Things About Me note you wrote? Yeah: everyone can read that. Here's what to do:

Mouse over Settings > Click Application Settings > click Edit Settings for each Application (links, notes, etc.) > Privacy.

Note: the first set of applications that appear when you to Application Settings isn't even all of the applications you use on Facebook. To see all of the applications you are using, Click the drop down menu that says Recently Used and switch it to Authorized. Yeah, you probably forgot you authorized a lot of these. At this point you may decide it's a better idea to get rid of some of these altogether - click the X at the right of the application to remove it.

OK, you're starting to get your information in order. At this point you may want to preview your profile again to see what it looks like to the world. You'll notice that all of the pages you're a fan of are still visible. This not be that big of a deal to you - you're a fan of Twilight, beer, and Camaros, who isn't? - but again, think about the people who can see this who you may not particularly want to know about your random interests. Unfortunately, the only way to make these not appear in your public profile is to remove yourself as a fan from the pages you don't want appearing here. There's no quick way to do this: you have to go to your profile and click the Info tab, go to the bottom of the page, click See All to the right of the Pages heading, and delete the ones you don't want visible to the world at large.

Looking back at your public profile, you'll note that your friend list is visible. Again, this may not seem like a big deal, but again, think to yourself: is it anyone's business? And consider this: Your network is valuable information, and there are people working furiously to map the way people are connected while the information is visible to anyone with a Facebook account. It's like mapping the human genome, but instead of mapping genes, they're mapping people. Don't believe me? Read this: http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2009/12/11/facebook-tosses-graph-privacy-into-the-bin/

To prevent your friends list from being public, you'll need to go to your profile, click the little pencil that appears in the top right corner of the Friends box on your profile and uncheck Show My Friends on My Profile. It makes the little thumbnail pictures disappear from your profile, but you can still click See All and see them yourself, as can your friends, or click the Friends link that appears at the top of Facebook at all time. Again, the important thing is that people you don't know can't see it.

One more thing that's still viewable in your public profile is your gender. It's not like they can't figure out what it is, but if you want it to disappear, you have to go to your profile and click to edit the Basic information, and uncheck Show my sex in my profile.

One last thing to worry about. You've likely seen your friends post a status update saying that Facebook will automatically index all your info on Google, which allows everyone to view it. Facebook is denying this, but they've denied or tried to downplay other privacy risks in the past, so it's a good idea to take it seriously. To change this option, go to Settings > Privacy Settings > Search > then UN-CLICK the box that says Allow indexing. 

Got all that? Good. Now preview your public profile again. This is the information you're putting out to the world at large. Is this information you feel comfortable making available to your current or future employers? 

Here are some more articles about guarding your identity on the internet: 

Posted at 02:55 PM in Technology |

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