by Leigh Goessl

Created on: June 11, 2009

In order to remain safe when you engage in any sort of online interaction, you have to be mindful of the information you share. Online safety practices should always be observed when you log onto the Internet. It doesn't matter if the correspondence is through e-mail discussion forums or groups, chatrooms or instant messengers, you can easily compromise your personal information if you are not careful.

Social networking sites such as Facebook are no different than any other kind of online interaction. Facebook requires a lot of personal information in order to actively participate because it's business model is based on real people as opposed to chat names or identities.

The good news is Facebook also provides you with some tools to help minimize exposure and combined with common sense, you can obtain some protection and a degree of control over who sees what on the Facebook interface.

Facebook offers these privacy tools to empower you to have some control over how much information you want shared publicly. If you want to reduce exposure to your personal information, here's what you do:

Facebook Privacy Settings

Facebook gives these for a reason and if you want to limit what kind of information is seen, you should take the time to explore the privacy settings offered.

You can access these through clicking on "settings" in the upper right hand corner (you must be logged in to do this). After you reach this screen you'll see you can customize several different aspects of Facebook to meet your preferences.

*The first you'll see is the ability to control the information seen on your profile page. If you click this link there is a plethora of options you can opt in or out of to design privacy preferences to meet your needs. Most people opt to keep their wall and profile from being exposed publicly, typically in order to see one, you have to become someone's Facebook friend.

*The second link restricts search capabilities. You can remove your membership from being visible in search engines; you can also pick and choose what information you want seen such as photos, friend lists, pages you are a fan of, ability to receive messages from non-friends or not, and a link to send you a message. You can choose any or all of these options when designing your privacy preferences.

*On the third option you'll find you can control what other friends see on your wall or in news feeds which go out publicly. Here you can also control whether or not you want people to see

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