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Sound Advice for Facebook Users

We've all heard the horror stories of Facebook accounts being hacked, and felt a little more than mild annoyance when Facebook decides to change they security and privacy settings and we suddenly find all the content we thought was private is now public. But keeping on top of all of this could be a full time job!

So how can we keep our Facebook accounts safer?

This week I read an interesting article on the Sophos security blog outlining a few ideas which can really help us keep our Facebook accounts private and secure - and most of it is much simpler than you would perhaps think!

Click on the link above to read the whole article - or, for a quick overview, read my summary below - and don't forget to share this with your friends on Facebook!

1. Make sure only Friends can see you timeline

If you click on the padlock icon in the top right hand corner of the Facebook page, you can click on 'Who Can See My Stuff?'.  You'll want to make sure the selection box is set to 'Friends' not 'Public'.  This will ensure only people you've become friends with can see your future posts.

2. Control who can contact your on Facebook

Under the same menu, you can click on 'Who Can Contact Me', make sure 'Strict Filtering' is on.  Here you can also limit those who can make a friend request to just 'Friends of Friends' if you prefer - rather than 'Everyone'.

3. Control who can discover your account on Facebook based on your phone number or email

If you click on the little dropdown arrow in the top right hand corner of the Facebook page, you can choose 'Settings', and then 'Privacy' from the left hand menu.

Here you can define 'Who can look me up?' options - the top 2 options should be set to 'Friends' and the 'Do you want search engines to link to your profile?' should be set to 'No' to stop search engines indexing your profile page.

4. Setup login notifications and 5. Turn on login approvals

These are a bit more advanced, so for the full instructions head over to the Sophos blog and follow their instructions.

My Top Tips

The problem with online social networks is that you're always at the mercy of their security - or lack of.  I think my best bit of advice is probably as simple as 'Don't share anything you wouldn't mind being made public' - just in case it is!

Stay safe!

Posted On: 19/06/2014

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