A lot of people have become confused by the new privacy policies Facebook has introduced.  Users were recently and repeatedly prompted to review their privacy settings, but chose to skip the step.  Eventually, Facebook made users review their settings. Some still do not understand how the new privacy features affect them.

To help, Gay Vantage has a rundown of the Facebook privacy changes.

Information about you everyone can see:

• Your default photo (this is a big change; you used to be able to hide this from non-friends)
• Your gender (you can still uncheck this though)
• Your city (you avoid having people see this by leaving that field blank)
• What pages you are a fan of (time to review these)
• Your friends (you can change this by clicking the pencil at the top of your friends list and unchecking “Show Friend List to everyone”
• You will show up in web searches for you (you can opt out in your privacy settings under the “Public Search Results” section)

One way to tweak privacy settings for different friends is to put your friends in different lists and then assign specific privacy policies for each group.  Doing this will also allow you to be selective about who sees your status updates because each update can now be shared to only specific lists of friends.

You should also carefully review the apps that you use on Facebook.  They can cause huge privacy concerns and show information about you that you thought was secure.  Some applications are great and make Facebook more useful.  If you’re in the closet, you may not want to have a app that helps you determine how gay you are on your profile page.

More importantly, remember that anything you put up on the Internet is never truly private.  The Internet, by definition, is a very public place where your secrets do not belong.

Tags: Social Networking, Technology