Who Is Watching You On Facebook?

If you are one of the 600+ million Facebook members, you may want to pay more attention to the privacy settings on your profile to make sure that you are protected from the prying eyes of insurance agents, employers, schools, and even attorneys (especially if you are involved in a car accident case or a divorce trial).

Who May Be Watching You on Facebook

- Employers: people have been fired from their jobs due to some content posted on their Facebook page

- Schools: prospective students have been rejected, and current students expelled because of their Facebook information.

- Insurance Companies and Attorneys: people injured in car accidents have been denied settlements because of information or pictures they shared on Facebook.

A word of advice to car accident victims: Scrutinize your own Facebook page as if you were an insurance agent. Go over every single detail posted there and either limit the access to your information or delete the content that may be used against you.

Just an example of what insurance agents and personal injury attorneys will look for: your religious beliefs, your social and financial situation, possible alcohol or drug use, whether you are a smoker, whether you have had previous injuries or health conditions, who your friends are, what you have posted after the accident, and so on.

Steps to Protect Yourself on Facebook

1. Be friends only with the people you know.

Don’t “Friend” someone unless you personally know them, even if they are friends with your friends. They may be insurance agents who have “friended” your friends just to get to your information.

2. Control your Photo Settings

On your Profile Privacy page under “Photos Tagged of You,” select “Customize” and “Only Me” to limit the access to your tagged photos. You can also manually change the privacy settings on each of your photo albums on the Photos Privacy page.

3. Disappear from searches

On the Profile Privacy Page, be sure to uncheck the box: "Create a public search listing for me and submit it for search engine indexing" for those searching for you on Google.

Be sure to also make your contact info private, except for close friends. To do this, go the Friends setting and make it Private.

4. Protect your Wall

While keeping in mind what you post on your Wall, you can also manage who else can post there. To disable friends from writing on your wall, go to your Profile Privacy Settings page and set up the Wall Posts section.

5. Privacy Settings and Google Alerts

Check in with Facebook’s ever changing privacy policies from time to time, and double-check your profile’s privacy settings to make sure you haven’t missed anything.

Also, if you have Gmail, sign up for Google Alerts for your name, so you will be alerted every time anyone posts anything about you.