One of the most frequent criticisms made of Facebook is that it doesn't do a good job of ensuring that your personal information remains private. Controls designed to ensure that your information remained private were buried in relatively obscure menu options and spread out over several places, and the default settings in many cases made all your information public and allowed applications to freely post to your wall. Adding to the general air of confusion, those settings often changed locations. As well, in its classic form, posting information to Facebook was an 'all or nothing' affair – any status updates you made would be visible to everyone on your friends list, and there wasn't any provision for restricting information to (say) family members or work colleagues or other groupings that made sense to you. Thankfully, Facebook has at least updated its settings to make it easier to control who sees your status updates.
It's likely this change wasn't due to a newfound sense of altruism; most observers credit the switch to the emergence of rival service Google+, which made the ability to control which groups of information you share with people one of its central selling points. Google+ has its own privacy concerns (such as forcing everyone who uses it to have a public profile), but its success in quickly attracting users meant that Facebook had little choice to come up with an easier way for individuals to control how information is shared.
Which options to use
The most visible manifestation of Facebook's new approach comes when you go to post a status update. If you click on the drop-down menu next to the 'Post' button, you can choose from a range of options for who will see a status update. If you have six friends who are in in your book club and you want to post purely for them, you can choose them using the 'Custom' option.
The default option is labelled as 'Public', rather than 'Everyone' which appeared in earlier versions of Facebook. Note that 'public' still only means that your updates are visible to other people who are friends with you, not to literally anyone. However, that phrasing serves as a useful reminder that Facebook comments can very easily become public property. (See 'Loose talk costs jobs' for a discussion of why this can be important.)
Along with these customised controls, Facebook also now offers the option to tag individual people mentioned in a post . Additional controls let you control other tagging elements; if a friend tags you in an unflattering photo, for instance, you can remove that tag from your wall. (You can also ask your friend to remove the tag, or opt to block someone altogether, though the last is a fairly drastic measure.)
A final change to the update box lets you identify your location, an extension of an earlier Places system made available to Facebook users on mobile phones (though this option has now been dropped). Some retailers offer discounts if you check in to their specific Facebook page, but tagging your location generally should be used carefully. Facebook can be a great way to tell friends and family you are on holidays, but if your address is easily discovered online it's also a potential open invitation to burglary.
Loose talk costs jobs
It's important to be realistic in your expectations when using Facebook or any social networking service. Facebook does offer an option to exclude specific people from seeing particular updates, but it would be naive to assume that you could use that choice to say something inflammatory about someone you know and assume they'll never see it. Given that you are likely to have other friends in common with the person you choose to exclude, the chances are that they will get to hear of your comments anyway.
Not broadcasting everything to everybody can be a useful strategy (especially in terms of ensuring that you don't bore acquaintances with irrelevant information), but it's still safest not to say anything on Facebook that you wouldn't be happy with pretty much anyone hearing. A recent decision by Fair Work Australia, which upheld the right of an employer to sack a member of staff who had made potentially threatening comments on his Facebook wall, underlines that what you consider to be private may still end up in the public eye.
