Facebook - help please

10_66

I don't know anything about Facebook (have spent ages looking at their website and not been able to find what I'm looking for), but am thinking of joining it. For security reasons, are there any must do's or don'ts when setting up the account (ie, they ask for your date of birth, which I'm a bit nervous about giving as it's such a public website).

Are the messages you post visible to all friends, or can you select certain people to see the messages?

If you sign up, can you see a list of someone's friends on their profile, or do you have to be invited to be their friend before you can see their list of friends?

Robin_T_Cox

Here are some useful links that will help answer your questions, and perhaps one or two more that you may find you have.

http://www.allfacebook.com/
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/the-complete-guide-to-facebook-privacy/
http://www.allfacebook.com/facebook-privacy-2009-02
http://www.pcworld.com/article/172604/protect_your_privacy_on_facebook_and_twitter.html

Hope this helps.

Tulip09

I am always on facebook and have changed all my privacy settings for different people / groups. In order to sign up you have to give your email/ date of birth etc however as soon as your account is up and running just change it. I have people in different folders family/ real friends/ game friends and set the level of access to what each group can see.

In order to set individual settings you just have to go into privacy settings in the drop down menu and at the bottom just click 'customise' this lets you give some groups access and block 'hide'others. For your date of birth or email, i have it set to 'only me'.

You can set preferences for all your posts/ whats shown on your 'news feed' etc or your friends lists - if you set it up and are still unsure, shoot my a pm and i will talk you through it all

KingL

You can give a false dob if you want (hell, you could use a name that isn't quite identical to yours!

They keep changing the security set up, but IIRC you can select security to determine the range of people who can see your posts [you certainly can with your picture galleries]. If in doubt, you could send PMs just to the sole intended recipient.

You can see a friend's friends name, profile pic, dob and city/country. After that, it depends on what security privs they have set up on their account.

Top tip is don't sign up to any of the third party widgets/games and stuff.

albert2011

You can select an option to set who all want to see your profile.

Depends on the other peoples settings you can check their profile if they allow non-friend to see the profile.

stevemcol

It's quite straight forward really: if you're the type that doesn't want to give too much away then facebook isn't for you, and that's fine. I can't see the point in siging up then hiding all your info; just stay away from FB. Simples.

tom_petty

There are various sites out there full of facebook safety tips. Off the top of my head can recommend one called Facecrooks.

renegade

stevemcol wrote: »

It's quite straight forward really: if you're the type that doesn't want to give too much away then facebook isn't for you, and that's fine. I can't see the point in siging up then hiding all your info; just stay away from FB. Simples.

There is another reason not to want to use FB as a social chat site- It has access to the great game of SCRABBLE on line!!!!!!!!

spikedouglas

I wouldn't worry too much. Just enact the simple security and rest assured that with 5 million users or whatever there are, there's plenty of other people who haven't paid attention.

spud17

500 million [STRIKE]saddos[/STRIKE] members.

rhythmsoup

If you decide to use facebook and you run windows like most folks do though I would recommend you make sure your security software is up to date and that you use firefox to access facebook and run the "noscript" plugin.

As facebook is so popular its become a target for all the criminals/hackers out there who want to propagate their malware in your general direction. Theres tech news items coming out almost weekly now of the next new facebook scam which usually involves some unsuspecting user clicking on a link that ends up installing some malware onto their machine... or worse still your PC ends up becoming part of a botnet....