Parry Aftab, the executive director for Wired Safety, a consumer resource that focuses on online security and privacy, says she has a simple test for gauging which information is Facebook-safe. “Would you put it on a sign in front of your house?” she says. “That’s got to be your measure.” (Wired Safety is one of five groups that sit on Facebook’s unpaid safety advisory board.)
Facebook has come under fire from users since December, when policy changes made more of users’ information open by default, unless they activated controls to keep it private. The outcry picked up in late April when the social networking site began pilot testing an “instant personalization” feature that allowed partner sites visited by a user to pull data from his or her profile and automatically share it with others. (For example, the feature could inform users’ Facebook friends that they had been using the Internet radio station Pandora to listen to Justin Bieber.) To avoid having their information shared, consumers must actively opt out on Facebook and on the partner sites, but they could still unwillingly have their information shared if their friends didn’t opt out, as well. The policy changes spawned user complaints, as well as concern from consumer advocates, Congress and the Federal Trade Commission.
Read more here: How to Secure Your Facebook Account