Privacy and Security

There have always been concerns regarding Facebook’s privacy. In 2006, Facebook implemented a new feature called 'News Feeds' that would display every action you took on the site to your friends, without giving the users the option to hide that information from anyone. This resulted in outrage on the social networking site. Members created petitions, groups on the site (some with hundreds of thousands of members), and many wrote about it on their own blogs until they were issued an official apology in addition to strict privacy options from the site's founder.

Sometime this year, some code used on Facebook's home page and search page was accidentally exposed due to a configuration problem on the site's server, which raised concerns about how secure your private data on the site really is.

Just last month, Facebook users raises another spark of privacy concerns when Facebook’s two-week-old marketing program is publicizing some users purchases for friends to see.

Nonetheless, Facebook has once again emphasise their commitment to safeguard users’ information and is working on giving users additional privacy options.

Thus it is important to note that it is not recommended to provide personal information such address, phone number or other private information on Facebook. There are also some recommended privacy setting that you could take note to protect your information.

Once you have logged in to Facebook, on the left hand corner of your Facebook, you will find “privacy”. Once you enter the privacy page, you can set the your security levels of privacy.

Under each of these setting, click on edit. On this edit page, you can decide who can view your profile, who can contact you, who can view your photos and messages. It is recommended that you set all to “Only my Friends” or “No one”.