Facebook traffic continues to grow as the social networking platform consolidates its position as one of the most influential websites on the planet. With registered users in excess of 200 million and over 113 million unique visitors to the site from within the US alone in May (according to respected Web analytics firm Compete), Facebook is starting to rival the major search engines in terms of traffic.

Clearly, Facebook is breaking new ground and we are all coming to terms with its presence and with its implications. The site is, in many respects, rewriting the rules as it goes along and it is only understandable that a number of significant questions have arisen in recent times regarding the security of the data collected by the company and the overall privacy considerations.

In July of 2009, a landmark statement was issued by Canada’s Privacy Commissioner berating Facebook for its failure to protect the personal information it gets from subscribers. While they acknowledged that Facebook was concerned about privacy issues, the investigators “found serious privacy gaps in the way the site operates.”

This leads us to significant questions and one in particular that every Facebook user should consider. To help you ponder the meaning of the Facebook universe, we have composed some tips to help you protect your privacy.

1. Efficiency – Establish separate lists for friends, family and business contacts.

This is a very useful feature that allows you to really categorize and separate these potentially very diverse groups of people. For example, you may well want to keep your private persona separate from your professional one. You may or may not want people at work to know what you do in your spare time, after all while you may not be ashamed or embarrassed by your membership of a particular group or your participation in a particular type of recreation or sport, people at work do not need to know and should not necessarily be privy to everything that you do outside of the work environment.

If you categorize the people in your Facebook world in this way (Facebook refers to them all as “friends,” although this is a rather generic term) you can interact with them accordingly. You should also know that you can add a person to more than one list, so someone could be in your professional list while also being in your friends list, if you have that type of relationship with that person.

It is important to note that you can allocate different privacy policies to each of your groups, so that there is no danger that your professional contacts may see one of your personal photographs from a special family night out or a raucous beach party, for example.

You can even apply separate friend lists to categorize your contacts geographically or according to specific keywords. It is rather easy to accumulate a very large number of contacts on Facebook, and while the whole idea behind the platform is to keep in touch with people, especially if you had previously lost contact with them, if you do not adequately categorize them they could become “lost” within your own database. So, consider establishing friend lists for friends who live state by state, or for those you may have met at a convention, on your annual summer vacation or so on. Just go to the friends area of your Facebook page to start working on this feature. Click on, “Friends-Lists-Create New Lists.”

2. Selective Invisibility – Make yourself invisible within Facebook.

For one reason or another, people want to keep their information private or at the very least want to be aware of who is requesting or viewing this information. You could be in a position of responsibility or in a high profile occupation, and while valuing what Facebook has to offer, you do want to make sure that your profile is “low.” As such, you will not want your personal information to show up within search results on Facebook, and this is rather easy to accomplish.

To remove yourself from search results within Facebook, you should first go to your search privacy settings page. Open “settings” in the top right-hand part of the blue bar at the top of the screen, click on “manage privacy” and then open the “search” option. Under “search discovery” you can select either “everyone on Facebook,” “friends of friends” or “only friends.” You can also specify that the people who do find you through Facebook search may see your profile picture, your friend list or pages that you are a fan of. Remember to save your changes.

3. Global Invisibility – Make yourself invisible to the rest of the Internet world.

Facebook is highly ranked by Google and the other major search engines and information from within Facebook is regularly displayed by the engines within their search results. This means that user profiles can be displayed, although this information is quite restricted. You may consider that exposure is a good idea and that people from your long-lost past may be able to simply “Google” your name and immediately see that you have a Facebook page, enabling them to make contact with you. If this is the case, you can opt to check the box allowing your profile to be available as a public search listing. To do this, go to “settings – privacy – manage – search.” Once you are there, scroll down to the public search listing box and check it. Immediately above is the “search results content” option and you should check the appropriate boxes within to stipulate what information is available within the public search environment, as well. For example, select your profile picture, your friend list, pages that you are a fan of, or select an option allowing people to link to you as a friend, or an option allowing people to send you a message.

For those who want to ensure that their information is not made available when somebody does a search for their name, ensure that the public search listing is unchecked.

4. Accountability – Don’t tag me, bro!

This has emerged as one of the biggest issues for Facebook and its users. The visual image is a highly potent communications tool on the Internet. People tend to scan webpages quickly, but always fix on images and photographs. It is probably too easy for people to “tag” photographs of you and post them on Facebook. If you are particularly concerned that your private life does not mix with your professional life, you could be worried that an incriminating photograph could be posted for all to see without your permission or knowledge. Maybe you let your hair down just a little bit too far at the office party, or someone took a lot of pictures at a recent political fund-raising event. Whatever your concern, you should know that it is possible to stipulate that your name “keyword” is not tagged to a photograph of you. Don’t forget that this can apply to videos as well!

While you can immediately remove a tag when you spot it, the damage may have been done by then, especially if you have not visited your Facebook page for a day or so.

To make sure that your tagged photographs or videos do not show up in all of your friend newsfeeds, go to “settings – privacy – manage – profile” and look for the “photos tagged of you” drop-down box. You have four options– allowing everyone to see, “friends only” may see, “friends of friends” may see, “some friends” may see or “only me.” You can even specify that everyone may see your photographs except for certain friends or those who are on one of those friend lists. In this way, you could exclude that “professional” friend list that you established earlier on. Apply the same customization for videos while you are there.

5. Secrecy # 1 – Be careful what you tell your friends.

This is an area that people get confused about rather easily. Many people have been embarrassed when they alter their relationship status within their profile and find that it is posted as a news item and all their friends get to know about it. This can lead to concerned comments being attached to the actual post itself, drawing further attention to it. You may have just gone through a breakup and are particularly upset about it in the first place. The last thing that you need is a public discussion about it! A certain amount of basic information is required within your profile, but you can control what is broadcast automatically and the settings are as follows:

Go to “settings – privacy – newsfeed and wall.” Here you will see that the highlighted section of your friends home page will include what you do or say, if you comment on a note, a video, a link, a photo or an album or if you change your relationship status. You can check or uncheck any one of these five boxes as you wish. If you go back to the privacy page and select “profile” you can select who is able to see your basic information by interacting with the drop-down box there as well.

6. Secrecy # 2 – There is an app for that, too.

Applications abound within the Facebook platform, some of which are very handy, some of which are funny or entertaining and some of which could be rather embarrassing. They could be especially embarrassing for you if you choose to download them, as unless you are careful a newsfeed story will be added to your profile telling everyone of your interest in the application.

You should make a habit of checking your profile often, and if you see that a post has been made detailing your interaction with the embarrassing application concerned, you can simply remove it.

7. Privacy – Protect your contact information.

Once you start building your Facebook presence and reaching out to friends and contacts from the past, you will be surprised at how, suddenly, you will get a message out of the blue from someone who you may remember from “way back then,” but only vaguely. If you decide to approve friend requests from such people you should be sure to make your contact information only selectively available.

If you are not particularly careful about who can see your contact information, as your friends lists grow you may find that you get e-mails from people who you can barely remember. Don’t forget to edit your settings as follows:

On your profile page, look in the left-hand column, probably below your photograph and there you will see “edit my profile.” Click this and various categories will appear including basic, personal, contact, education and work. You can open up these categories and apply as much or as little information as you need, within. Then, look over to the right and you’ll see a small icon which looks like a padlock, for some reason. Open this and you will see that you can specify who has access to each item of information.

If you have categorized your friends according to family – friends – professional as we discussed earlier, you can make sure the right categories of people have access to the appropriate items of information and contact details.

8. Graffiti – Make your walls selectively visible.

Anyone can post to your wall, yet you do not always want your friends to see what is written. Again, we are coming back to friend categorization in many instances, although there are many different ways that you can be embarrassed and we don’t want to know! If you use Facebook for business and for pleasure purposes, you need to be particularly careful about what you allow to be written to your wall. You can customize these settings, so that your wall postings are only visible to certain people and you can also specify which friends are able to post to your wall in the first place.

Firstly, go to your profile and then click on “wall” if it is not already selected. Just underneath the “what’s on your mind?” box on the right-hand side is a magnifying glass next to the word “options.” Click on this first of all. This will open up three separate categories for you, your friends or “you and your friends.” On the right-hand side you will see the option to amend the settings for each of these categories. If you open up this page you will then be able to specify if friends may post to your wall and, if so, who will be able to see those posts. Once again, you have infinite customization options here. Spend a little time in here and think through all your options. You really can customize whatever appears on your wall if you check the appropriate boxes.

While on this subject, you should note that you might think that when you post to someone else’s wall, this is a private message between you, but this is not necessarily the case. If the friend to whom you are posting has not checked the appropriate box, it is possible that every one of his friends will see your message, so go to: “settings-privacy-newsfeed and wall” and look for “posting to someone’s wall may appear in your mutual friends’ News Feeds” – un-check that box.

Note that you can also go to your “settings – privacy” page and customize your wall post requirements there.

9. Company – Who do you associate with?

For security reasons, or once again because you may be selective when it comes to revealing your friends, you may want to modify who can see your friend list. You may well have a huge number of friends and feel that this is some kind of societal statement, but you may not want to make the details available to potential marketers or to those who just like to browse around and see who interacts with whom.

Once again this can be a little difficult to find, as it is not contained underneath the “friends” tab in your blue bar at the top of the page. Go to “settings – privacy – profile” and scroll down to “friends,” where you may specify who can see your list of friends by selecting the option from the drop-down box.

10. Photography – Make sure that you index and categorize.

It has been said that Facebook is really designed for the distribution and sharing of photos and videos. Before you know it, you may have hundreds of photographs, and you should – right from the get go, make sure that you categorize them within folders appropriately. If you don’t want your photo albums to be visible to everyone, specify within the relevant section, album by album.

Go to “profile – photos” and you can modify your settings by clicking on the album privacy.

Conclusion.

Some people find it rather difficult to navigate their way around Facebook in general, and especially when it comes to allocating their settings. Hopefully this post will help you to prevent those embarrassing items from appearing within your Facebook account and it should go a long way to assuage your fears about privacy and security. Facebook is part of a communications revolution within our society, and while the owners are still finding their feet and are modifying the platform as they go along, the medium is likely to remain an essential part of our lives for the foreseeable future.

Adam Toren