How to: Change your privacy settings for Facebook

Facbook’s long announced change for its graph search means more people’s accounts will be available for others to see.

You use to be able to decline to have your information available for graph search, but Facebook has taken that option away from users.

You have a couple of options if you don’t want people to be able to go online and see what you did in Las Vegas back in 2009.

The most reliable way to ditch those incriminating photos and posts, is to do a search on yourself with whatever key words you deem necessary and draw up those pages.

Then delete them.

Yes, it was a fun time, but  do you really want those stripper or bong photos available for others to see? 

It may not be as bad as that. It may just be an ex's photo you don’t want your current significant other to be able to view. 

Barring that, you can try to make your account more restive by going to the settings on your account (it is the little lock with the three lines on the right-hand side of the blue strip at the top of page.

When you click on it you’ll get a page that says “Privacy Settings and Tools’.

The first area is ‘Who can see my stuff’. Mine says ‘friends’ but you’ll also have the option to choose ‘everyone’, ‘friends except acquaintances’ ‘only me’ and ‘custom’. Custom allows you to specifically see your ‘stuff’. You can choose to opt out Granny, your co-workers and other people who you are friends with.

You can go down through the options and change the settings. 

I discovered I had not changed my setting under the ‘Who can look me up ?’ category for my e-mail address or phone and as a consequence, everyone had access to that information. 

There is also a box to opt out of allow Google and other search engines to access your Facebook page. That’s extremely handy to do if you don’t want some future employer looking to it as a reference on your activities. 

The Bermuda Sun will have more on Friday on dealing with Facebook privacy settings.