Massachusetts Personal Injury Library
Who Is Watching You On Facebook?
Do you have a Facebook account?
With over 600 million members and growing, chances are you are among them, or have at least heard about Facebook.
Keeping in touch with friends over Facebook is gaining more and more popularity every day, but many people do not realize that their private information may be not be as protected as they thought.
Keeping Up with Facebook
If you think that your Facebook account is safe just because it is password protected, think again.
Unless you keep up with Facebook's actions day to day, you may be falling behind. It is no longer enough to just update your settings – you need to check the settings again and again, but most important of all – you have to be careful about what you post and who can see it.
Facebook is tweaking their members' privacy policy every day, updating the settings on members' accounts, even considering selling part of their information (such as phone numbers or addresses) to third parties.
Who May Be Watching Your Facebook Profile
You may not know exactly who's watching your information and pictures posted on Facebook, but you can get a pretty good idea. Besides your approved Friends and community members on Facebook, other people have been known to scrutinize your personal information. Examples include the CIA, insurance companies, employers, educational institutions and even attorneys (especially if you have been involved in a Boston car accident, or have a pending divorce trial).
Over the past few years we've all heard about people getting fired from their jobs due to some content posted on their Facebook page, or expelled from school, or denied a settlement in a personal injury lawsuit.
Your Information May Be Used Against You
Based on what you decide to share on Facebook, here are a few scenarios of how your information can be used against you.
Judged By Your Employer
According to CareerBuilder.co.uk, more than half of all employers (53%) research potential job candidates on social networking sites like Facebook. If you are applying for a job, one of the things to remember is to clean up your Facebook profile. This is also important if you want to keep the job you have, since people have been fired based on pictures they posted, or updates they shared on their Facebook pages.
Judged By Insurance Agents and Lawyers
If you have been involved in a car accident, be prepared to have your Facebook presence examined by insurance agents and personal injury attorneys to try to determine what sort of person are you. They will look at your religious beliefs (or lack thereof), at information pointing to alcohol use, drug abuse, if you are a smoker, if you've shared details about the accident, what your communities are, what you have written on your Wall, and even images of you socializing (especially if they are after the accident).
How You Can Protect Yourself
There are steps you can take to limit the access to other people looking up your personal information on Facebook. Do not waste time. Start today!
Know Your Friends
Be Friends only with people you personally know. It's not about quantity, it's about quality.
Delete all "friends" that you don't know and do not accept Friend Requests from people you've never met, even if they are friends with your friends. It doesn't matter how many friends you may have in common, if you don't know a person, don't "Friend" that person.
Double-Check Your Photos
Go to your Profile Privacy Page and under "Photos Tagged of You" select "Customize". By choosing "Only Me and None of My Networks" you are limiting the access to your tagged photos to just yourself.
If you want a select group of friends to be able to view your photos, choose the option "Some Friends" and add the select people to this group. You can also manually change the privacy settings on each of your photo albums on the Photos Privacy page.
Disappear From Searches
On the Profile Privacy Page, be sure to uncheck the box: “Create a public search listing for me and submit it for search engine indexing” for those searching for you on Google.
Be sure to also make your contact info private, except for close friends. This way strangers will not be able to see who your friends are so they can target them, or see your information (including your profile picture). To do this, go the Friends setting and make it Private.
Guard Your Wall
While keeping in mind what you post on your Wall, you can also manage what other people post on your Wall.
To disable friends from writing on your wall, go to your Profile Privacy Settings page and set up the Wall Posts section.
Other Things to Remember
Keep up with Facebook's ever-changing privacy policies and look at your privacy settings from time to time just to make sure you haven't missed anything.
Also, if you have Gmail, sign up for Google Alerts for your name, so you will be alerted every time someone posts anything about you.
