Basic privacy controls

Basic privacy controls
Facebook's default privacy settings
Facebook’s default privacy settings for people under 18 (see Recommended in
the screen shot above) are the same as they are for adults, except, as we said
earlier, Everyone is defined as only friends, friends of friends, and people in
school or work networks. That alone provides a degree of protection, even if
the teen does nothing to customize the settings. However, as you can see
from the privacy settings screen, there are ways to expand or further restrict
who can see your basic information.
For example, above Recommended are three other options. For adults,
Everyone is extremely open because it can expose your status updates,
comments, Contact Information and possibly even your location to anyone on
Facebook, even if they’re not a Friend or even a Friend of a Friend. That’s why
we don’t recommend that for anyone.
If you or your teen checks Friends of Friends, that means that all of his or her
friends’ friends can see their information. While you do have control over who
your friends are, you have no control over your friends’ friends, which in some
cases could add up to thousands of people.
The Friends Only option is a more restrictive choice because it hides all of the
information from friends of friends or people in a child’s school network who
are not on your child’s friends list. With this option selected, only people the
child has accepted as friends can access the information.
Safety Point: For maximum privacy, safety and security, we recommend
that teens start by setting their privacy to Friends Only and then go to
Customize Settings to consider even more private settings for some
information.
Customizing privacy settings
While many users know about these basic privacy settings, a lot of people
don’t know that they can be customized even further so that users can have a
lot of control over who can see what.
Near the bottom of the Choose Your Privacy Settings screen is a link to
Customize settings.
If you click on this link, you are taken to a page where you have a great deal
of detailed control over your privacy.
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“Things I share” portion of privacy settings
The Customized settings page is divided into three categories: Things I share,
Things others share and Contact information.
To the right of each item on the page is a drop-down box that lets you specify
who has access to each of these items. For example, by default your posts can
be seen by Everyone, but you can click on that box and change that to Friends
of Friends, Friends Only and Customize.
.
The same choices are available for each item on this page. Pay close attention
to items in the Things others share section. For example, by default Friends of
Friends can tag, or identify, your teen in photos they post in their Facebook
pages. You might want to limit this to Friends Only. [We’ll get to the Places
section later.]
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“Things others share” section of privacy settings
Also pay attention to Contact information. By default it’s Friends Only, but you
might not even want your Facebook friends to know your phone numbers,
address or even email address. There are two ways to prevent that: 1) Don't
include it in your profile to begin with, and 2) use the Customize setting to
even further restrict who can see that or any other information.
Safety Point: We do not recommend that anyone – especially minors –
enter their home address. We also feel that teens should not enter their
phone numbers, even though – by default – the information is available to
Friends Only.
“Contact Information” section of privacy settings: Consider limiting who can see your
contact information.