Think about the content you put online. Many social networking sites—such as Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster—are filled with personal or incriminating information that can come back to haunt you.
That embarrassing photo from last weekend's bash or list of crudely-stated interests could tarnish your reputation with a promising love interest, your professor or alum/future employer. And exposing such personal details as your address, phone number or birth date could make you an easy target for identity thieves and stalkers.
These sites provide privacy controls that let you select who can and can’t view such personal information as your address, phone number and birth date.
Check your privacy settings. Just how open and vulnerable are you?
Don't ruin your reputation. A thoughtless posting that seemed funny at the time might connect up with someone you wouldn't want to see it. Even worse, it might become nearly impossible to remove once it's cached on the web.
Stay safe. Think twice about what you post. Someone else could take advantage of your personal information, like an identity thief, stalker or a fellow student with a grudge after a recent quarrel.
Do no harm. Be careful what you say about others. Don’t post something illegal, libelous, or potentially harmful to others.
Facebook access is available to anyone—not just students. That is a big community, and one you may not necessarily want to share everything with.
You can readily control most of your personal information in Facebook through the My Privacy page. You can deactivate your account at any time through the My Account page. You can also take down posts you’ve put up on other people’s pages, such as on their wall.
Make sure your info is seen only by those you want to see.
Check your privacy settings. Facebook accounts are set to share your profile with everyone in the network. Unless you change these settings, your professors, TAs, parents and many people you don't know will see your entire profile and your information could end up in their news feed or mini-feed. Do you really want everyone to know everything?
Know who has access to your contact information. Make sure your preferred email, screen name, phone numbers, and address are only available to the people you want to have that information. You can Block People which keeps them from seeing or contacting you on Facebook. Maybe you should set up a Limited Profile, which lets you block access to some content to some people.
Control wide linking to your tagged photos. Anyone can tag a photo with your name. You can control if those tags link to photos in your profile. Think about whether you want an ever expanding gallery of images of you.
Be aware of who has access to your Wall, Groups and Online Status. Do you want everyone to see your Wall? Maybe. The default settings in Facebook are to provide everyone in the network (at Brown and beyond) access to this information. Know who might see what you are doing—check your My Privacy settings.
Protect yourself from identity theft.
Facebook is a great way to connect with others, but unfortunately identity theft reported by college students is rapidly on the rise.
Why are college students such great targets?
They're likely to have clean credit histories and they're less likely to keep on top of their credit card statements and accounts—opening the opportunity for time to pass before the theft is realized.
What information allows people to steal your identity?