When it comes to protecting your privacy, Facebook poses some significant challenges. Whether you’re applying for a job and you don’t want your prospective boss to read that your interests include procrastinating and playing solitaire, or your mom just friended you and you’d rather she not see those pictures you just posted from spring break, it is important to know who has access to your account. Luckily, Facebook offers different privacy settings so that you can be in full control.

Accessing Facebook Privacy Settings
By clicking on the “settings” tab and then “privacy,” you can choose from a list of options. From there, by clicking on “profile,” you can tailor your account so that only certain people have access to your profile. You can set it so that anyone with an account can view your profile, or you can hit “customize” and narrow it down so that only friends, friends of friends or people within your network can see your information. They even let you narrow it down further to control what subcategories within your networks may view your account. For example, you can exclude alumni at your university but include undergraduates.

Changing Search Settings
You can also control how easy you are to find on Facebook, along with how much information people who search for you can see. By clicking the “search” tab, you can decide if you want potential friends to be able to see your profile picture, if you want them to see your list of friends or if you want them to be able to send you a friend request. You can also decide if you want to be able to be found by means outside of Facebook, such as a search engine.

Adjusting Feed And Wall Settings
Next, by clicking on “News Feed and Wall” you can determine which of your activities and profile changes will appear on another person's news feeds and walls. You can set it, for example, so that it will appear on your friends’ homepages when you comment on a photo, but not when your relationship status changes. Lastly, by clicking on the “applications” link, you can control how various applications are allowed to view your information and interact with your profile on Facebook.

Though Facebook is generally good about allowing you a reasonable amount of privacy, that doesn’t mean you don’t have to censor what you put in your profile, or what others put about you. Despite many reports to the contrary, Facebook does not claim the right to all material, such as photographs or notes, posted on their site, but, at the same time, there is no way to know for sure that once you have deleted the information that it is gone for good. A seemingly innocuous photo can come back to haunt you--just ask Michael Phelps.

Therefore, if you have any concerns or reservations about the information or pictures you are posting, err on the side of caution. You never know if you will be running for office some day, and if you do, you don’t want to lose an election purely because of a questionable photo you took in college.