Make yourself exclusive

 

In the Account tab on your Facebook profile, you can set almost every part of your profile to be viewable only to your friends. You cannot specify which friends can see what information, but if you’ve picked your friends carefully, that shouldn’t matter. Think about the information you’re offering through your profile and your status updates and decide who you actually want to know it.

Most of the settings you can manipulate are pretty innocuous, but hidden among the other settings is something that Facebook doesn’t tell you about when you sign up. It’s the sort of thing that wouldn’t even occur to most websites, because the violation of privacy is so blatant and obvious it’s startling.

Click on the Applications, Games and Websites button in your privacy settings. On that page, there’s an “Info accessible through friends” section. See, when your friends play a game or use an application on Facebook, that application can see not only your friend’s profiles, but yours as well. Whether you play or not, Farmville has access, through your friends, to your relationship status, religious views, and all of your photos. Go ahead and uncheck every single box on that page.

Likewise, disable Instant Personalization and Public Search to limit the amount of information Facebook shares with third parties.

With all of that done, you’re still a celebrity, and Facebook is still a crowd of paparazzi parked on your lawn, but at least you’ve managed to pull the shades before you do anything embarrassing.