Facebook

Alright. You've probably heard Facebook's privacy bullshit in the news recently, or heard friends saying they're closing their account. Yes, their privacy policy is both longer than the US Constitution and out of line but you don't have to quit to keep most of your information locked down.

First, consider starting over with a clean slate. Say you created your Facebook account back in grade school and you're preparing to graduate college. That's a wealth of information about you, dirt and all. You can create a new Facebook account, friend your old account, then read your friends from the new account by browsing the list on the old. For more instructions on how to do that, read this.

Two words for you: Lock down. Say you go to get hired by some nice company in some city somewhere but they look you up on Facebook and turn you down from some photos you were tagged in at that massive party the weekend before. Sure it's wrong - I don't think it's illegal yet, and businesses do it all the time. The cure? Set the majority of your privacy settings to FRIENDS ONLY. Do that from the Privacy settings page.

I'm not sure what the default privacy settings are anymore but they pretty much open you up to the world. For example, see this website - http://youropenbook.org/. I went through each of the sections and marked the settings as Friends Only or Custom then Only Me.

The point of conflict right now is in the Friends, Tags and Connections area, where they first set your location and all your interests to Everyone on default. You can hide them to Friends Only, but each and every one of the "interest pages" are public and your name is on that page. Sure, cooking and swimming are harmless interests but if you want to keep your guilty pleasure of underwater basket weaving private, your only option now is to remove it from your interests on Facebook.

Another useful privacy tool is the option to hide the photos and videos you were tagged in by default. This option would've spared the individual in the anecdote above. I set mine to Only Me (via the Custom option.)

This past Friday it was said that Facebook held an emergency mandatory meeting, presumably about their privacy blunder. I don't think it's time to jump ship just yet, especially since most everyone I know uses Facebook as a default mode of communication.

The real information to get out of this post is that you have control over most of the data you put on Facebook, but they've deemed your interests and current location as public knowledge, so to prevent it from ending up on Google and in the hands of an ex, a stalker, or your future employers' hands, remove it from Facebook.