privacy on the internet is almost nonexistent. A quick google search of your name could possibly pull up old photos of you from years ago. Figuring out how to keep your photos and posts private online can help keep you and your family safe.

If you have children, you might understand how dangerous it is to tag your location in pictures. You probably already know not to tell people where your kid goes to school, or what they do when school is over.

If you don’t have kids or grandchildren you will still want to protect yourself and your friends from hackers and unsolicited messages.

If you have a strong online presence (i.e. participate in a lot of groups) you’ll want to keep your photos and posts private from the wandering eyes of people who disagree with you.

So here five Settings on Facebook that you need to change right now.

Audience

Who can see your posts? Check your audience in your privacy settings. From there you can automatically decide who gets to see what you post. You can choose to make your posts public (everybody can see them) or you can choose to only share the posts with people you are friends with.

This setting is especially important when sharing posts about personal life (i.e. work, school, etc.) and when sharing posts about children.

Hide your phone number and email

The last thing you want is an unsolicited phone call from “Johnny-Unknown”. Information like your phone number, email, date of birth, and hometown are all shared in your “about me” section. You can choose to share this information with everybody, just your friends, or only yourself. I personally chose only me.

Who can send you friend requests

The best way to stop unknowns from sending you friend requests is to change the setting on Facebook. You can change the setting so that only friends of friends can send you requests. This helps when you don’t want to travel out of your specific group of friends.

Lookup using a phone number and email address

Even though you’ve already hidden your phone number and email address it is still possible for someone to look you up using that information. A new fad on Social Media includes texting random numbers with outlandish jokes (Text Prank). This should only reinforce the fact that it is extremely easy to find someone’s information just by searching for their phone number.

The same goes for email, anybody you email can look you, and your personal information, up without exhausting too much effort. The good news, though, is that you can change these settings to make sure that you are almost impossible to find by people who don’t know your name.

Search Engine Links

Remember when I said that a simple google search can bring up your old photos? Well, it can also link to your profile. This is something you might not want if you are applying for a new job. Your prospective employers might just try to look you up, and there’s a chance that you don’t want them seeing what you post on social media. There are many other reasons you might want to hide your social media from the eyes of the all-seeing Google, and thankfully it’s an easy fix.

So there you have it, five important privacy settings that you should definitely go change, like, right now.

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