Family Safety on Facebook

I was talking to someone the other day about the pros and cons of facebook. Obviously, everyone has their opinions but for those of you who have children on facebook or are on facebook yourself, I have a few suggestions that may improve your experience and keep you safe.

1. Know the passwords: I think that it is important that you know your family's passwords for each other. Facebook is a social networking site, anyone in the world is aloud to join. Just as we have been recommended to have our computers in a public area, high traffic area of the house sharing passwords is a good way to make sure we are open with our use of facebook.

2. Know your friends: It is important because as mentioned above anyone can join facebook that you know who it is your are selecting as friends. This goes for the rest of your family also. You should be just as selective in adding friends on facebook as you would in real life. The items your friends post on facebook are posted on your homepage and are seen as soon as you log in for good or bad. Be sure you can trust their posts. Also, just as you would want to know your children's friends in person, you should know who they are talking to online.

3. Monitor, monitor, monitor....It may seem a little big brother but the reality is facebook is an open door to anyone who is a member. Anything that you can see others can see, by monitoring what is going on with your children's accounts you can keep them safe.

4. Set the permissions on your account to Friends Only: By default the profiles for facebook are set to friends and their networks. This means that everything you post about yourself will show on your friends site and anything you post about a friend will show up on that friends profile and will show to ALL their friends too. This means that any friends of your friends are a click away from seeing your profile. This goes for your children too.

5. Realize your information is public: Anything and everything you post on facebook should be considered public. Once you post, anyone who has access to your posts can share it with the world. This includes pictures, statuses, notes...everything. All they have to do is click share on the item on their profile and it is immediately shared with all their friends on facebook regardless of whether or not they are your friends. They can also simply copy and paste anything you have posted to another site, blog or simply print it off to share.

6. Watch who tags you and who you are tagging: When you tag people in a picture any comment posted about that tag goes out to everyone you tagged, even if the message is directed toward you. Also, the item you tagged them in appears on your profile. The same goes for any item you have been tagged in. It appears in your profile saying to all your friends you have been tagged in it. If you don't want that item to appear on your profile you must delete it.

Now, in no way am I trying to detour anyone from using facebook. I am an avid user and I know and understand the benefits and dangers of using facebook. It is that reason precisely that I share this information as there are some out there that may benefit from these simple recommendations.