The guide, which was announced via a note by Facebook Security, covers a range of topics such as how to protect your Facebook account, avoid scams and the correct usage of the security settings.

It was written by former Internet Safety Director at Symantec, Linda McCarthy, Purdue University security research engineer, Keith Watson and teacher, editor and mother of Facebook users, Denise Weldon-Siviy.

Click this link to view ‘Own Your Space: A Guide to Facebook Security’.

Today while perusing the happenings of Facebook, I came across an article of a British man who used information posted on his neighbors’ Facebook profiles to hack into their bank accounts via banking websites. He spent two years and several hours every day using this information and intercepting their mail to figure out the passwords to their bank accounts. By finding out their username and answering the personal questions asked by the ‘Forgot your Password’ feature, he managed to steal more than £35,000 (US$57,000). (Read the full article here)

The frequency of these FB horror stories is frightening. Once again, I was forced to question, ‘Do we share too much of our lives online?’. The limits seem to change so often that I came up with a few ‘Facebook Guidelines’ that will hopefully help with this problem.

1. Check your Privacy Settings closely. Make sure only your friends can see your profile. You do not need strangers knowing all your business. A good example of this is the website, OpenBook. It allows anyone to search status updates of Facebook users with unprotected profiles. Their names and profile pictures come up with the status updates. Creepy, right? Protect your profiles!
2. Stop friending strangers. For all those people you knew 20 years ago and really don’t know now, limit their access to your profile. Utilize the ‘Friends Lists’ Feature. It may be difficult, but it’s worth it to limit certain people’s access.
3. Never put your full birthday on your profile. It’s the first stop for identity theft.
4. Don’t tell the world that you’re going on vacation. It’s an invitation to rob your house. But on the other hand, if you were utilizing your friends list properly, you could simply tell your really good friends (then it just becomes bragging!).
5. Be careful of what you post for the world to see. Ask the young rioters who just got a 4 year sentence in England for ‘enticing a riot on Facebook’ (do note, no one actually rioted in their area. Makes that 4 years look a little harsher?). It’s never a good plan to post, tweet or upload pictures of illegal activities. Somebody will report you, and rightfully so.
6. Don’t announce private messages to all your friends. Use private messaging to have private conversations with your good friends. Especially invitations. When making a Facebook event, triple check that you are only sending it to certain people and not all of Facebook. Party crashers aren’t everybody’s idea of a great time, especially when the numbers reach in the 1000′s.
7. Choose a difficult password. And never use the same password for everything. It’s just asking for problems.

There’s also the never-ending debate about children’s photos on Facebook. Inevitable or avoidable?  The jury’s still out on this one. In the case of children, I think names, locations, and most definitely school uniforms should be left off the internet. But as usual, if you have strict privacy settings, do you really have to worry?

An interesting read for those who are curious about this topic is an article on the New York Times’ website called ‘Guardian of their Smiles’ .

Thoughts? Tell me what you think below or on our Facebook page.

The feature recognizes your face in (most) pictures then suggests tagging you in them when your friends’ upload an album. Regardless, you’re going to get tagged if your friends want to tag you. This just gives the option of tagging a group of pictures.

It’s important to note that you will always have the option to untag yourself. Also, these tagging suggestions appear to your friends only.

For those actually uploading the pictures, it makes tagging a lot easier.

If this doesn’t sound like something you’re interested in, here’s how to turn it off.

Go to Account > Privacy Settings.

Choose Customize settings.

Scroll to Things Others Share. Look for Suggest photos of me to friends. Click Edit Settings.

Now to choose Enable or Disable.

For those who may not see this option yet, it’s because it’s hasn’t reached you yet. Give it a few days and it’ll be there.

FaceNiff allows users to intercept user’s account credentials over public Wi-Fi connections (including WEP, WPA and WPA2). It does not work if the network is EAP encrypted.

The app works on the premise that once a user enters their username and password, the information is stored in a ‘cookie’ and then the cookie can be accessed over the public network. The biggest limitation being that the Android phone needs to be rooted. A process that allows the user full access to their phone so that they can modify the phone as much they please.

The makers maintain that the app is for educational purposes only, and stress that it is illegal to access other users’ information in certain countries.

Last year, there was a similar occurrence with Firesheep, a Firefox extension that allowed the same ability to steal user credentials. This caused social media sites to up their games and enable secure browsing.

I don’t explain this to assist in those looking to hack accounts (you can find that information anywhere). I would like to emphasize the need to keep your accounts secure. Be extremely wary of what you’re accessing on public Wi-Fi networks.

FaceNiff currently works for Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, YouTube and Nasza-Klasa on several different brand of Android phones.

Keep your secure browsing on while in public locations. Facebook’s own is set to default now, but users turn it off to use certain games and applications.

Read our Understanding Secure Browsing on Facebook post if you need help with this.

We can all admit that our Facebook friends are not created equal. The things you may want to share with your family and closest friends, you may not want to share with Sarah and Bob from your office, or that college friend who you’re barely acquainted with now.

Add the abilities of Facebook Chat, where sometimes you just want to talk to your good friends without being visible to the three dozen others online.

Let’s not forget our Facebook gamers. You know it’s always difficult to get ahead in these games without support from friends playing the same games (They’re called social games for a reason!). Sometimes your friends just don’t play these games as avidly as you do. This leaves you with the tempting offer of adding strangers as friends solely for social gaming.

Enter Facebook Friends List.

You have been forewarned: this takes a lot of work and several steps.

Creating a List

1. Select Friends in your side navigation from either your News Feed page or Profile page.
2. Select Edit Friends located at the top of the page.
3. Then select Create a List.
4. From there, Name Your List (eg. Work, Best Friends, FarmVille friends) and Select Friends to add to this list.
5. To add or remove a friend from a list, you can hover over a friend in your friends lists and a ‘Edit Lists’ drop down with appear.

Now that you have these nifty lists. What can you do with them?

Privacy Settings

1. Go to Account>Privacy Settings (Check out our Privacy Settings article if you need help with this)
2. Choose Customize Settings
3. Now for each option in your settings you will have to personally customize. Go to the drop down on the setting, the last option will be Customize.
4. The Custom Privacy Box will appear and you can make this visible to: Select ‘Specific People’ and type the name of your list. OR you can hide this from…again type the name of your list. It should appear.

For example, the FarmVille players out there, who added friends just for FarmVille play, may make their privacy settings look like this through the ‘Hide this from’ setting:

Sharing Information to Lists

Finally, you can make your wall posts visible (or hidden) to your lists.

When you go to post, you have to select the small lock icon next to Share first.

From there you select Customize and follow the steps above. There is the option of setting that as your default as well. So if you wish to exclude ‘Work’ for example from all your posts, or if you want to post only to your FarmVille friends, you can do this but you have to remember to use the Lock Icon before posting.

This works for the Gamers out there as well. You want to share a post like this FarmVille one, use the Lock Icon to share only with FarmVille friends.

Oh yeah, you can also Filter Your News Feed by friends lists.

Can’t say I didn’t warn you! It’s a lot of work. Hope you found this helpful.

Leave us your thoughts in the comment box below.

Recently we gave you an update on the new feature of ‘How to Hide Activities on Your Facebook Wall’. Here’s the equivalent for your news feed.

You should know that your News Feed is broken down into ‘Top News’ and ‘Most Recent’.

‘Most Recent’ consists of a dropdown menu which allows you to filter by categories Facebook suggests and by Friends Lists (read our post on creating Friends Lists and how they can help you). At the bottom, it gives you the ‘Edit Options’ settings.

This setting can also be found at the bottom of your news feed, in the bar that allows you to select ‘Older Posts’.

Within ‘Edit Options’, you can filter your News Feed by ‘Friends and pages you interact with the most’ or ‘All your friends and pages’. It also shows you whose posts you have chosen to hide.

Hiding these posts are done through the [x] on each post. You can hide a single post, hide all posts by a friend/application/page and Mark as Spam.

If you appreciate this information, let us know on Facebook or Twitter. Send us a message on what Facebook information you’d like to know about!

Facebook is powerful tool, which can be used for both good and evil. We’ve all heard horror stories. Relationships ruined over tagged photos or those just plain old unflattering tags, status update overshares and let’s never forget the friendly status update hijacking.

Seriously, many of us enjoy Facebook’s capabilities without thinking too much of its consequences. In reality, many users are placing huge portions of their lives on Facebook.

It may not be you, but just in case, I suggest going into Account>Privacy Settings, and taking a good look at what information is available to who.

The first section is Connecting on Facebook. This is all about who has access to you via searches and messaging.

The next part is the most important. Sharing on Facebook.

It should come with the disclaimer: Share Carefully!

Use the ‘Customize Settings’ link at the bottom of this section and make sure the settings you have suit you.

Finally, see what information you are allowing games and application to access. You may think since none of your information is public, these apps cannot get to it, but some of them access it anyway.

In your Privacy Settings, (like seen above: Account>Privacy Settings). Go to Apps and Websites at the bottom of the page. Select Edit your settings.

Next to the apps you use is Edit Settings.

Once there click ‘Edit Settings’ for each app you use.

You’d be surprised that some of them are allowed to access all your information and you can’t change it. I would suggest removing those apps.

Some, like CityVille seen above, are allowed to ‘Post to your Wall’, but you have the option to remove it.

Look through all your applications carefully. It’s your safest bet.

Also, read about ‘How to Make Friends Lists‘ to learn how to make your Facebook account even more private.

That’s all, folks! Remember, be careful what you put out there, you never know when it’s going to come back and bite you!

The actions below only hide information on YOUR WALL. The activities will still appear on your friends’ news feed.

Go to your Profile. On your wall, pick which activity you no longer want to see.

Click the [x] which deletes the post. The drop down now has Hide all ‘type’ activity….

Take this example of ‘Hide all Platform activity’:

Types include:

• profile changes
• walls posts
• comments
• likes
• friending
• platform (includes games and apps)
• relationships
• events
• discussions

Once you select this, a screen will appear prompting you if this is what you want to do and you simply click ‘Hide All’.

If you ever wish to change this, scroll to the bottom of your wall. The bar there contains ‘Older Posts’ and ‘Edit Options’. Select ‘Edit Options’.

From there you can re-enable whichever activity you removed by clicking the [x] and pressing SAVE.

Please if you like this article, share it with your friends through Facebook and Twitter.

The fastest way to check this is non-secure browsing shows up as http:// in your URL bar. When using secure browsing, it becomes https://

Secure browsing protects your information from being taken by third party sites. For instance, you would notice on most bank websites that a secure connection is being used. This ensures that the information being transferred is safe.

To change this setting, follow these steps.

1. Go to Account > Account Settings

2. Go to Account Security > Click Change

3. Check the box under Secure Browsing (https) > Click Save

For the app users here, you will find that some apps offered by Facebook cannot be used with a secure connection. A message offering to turn off your secure browsing will appear.

Facebook is yet to resolve this problem. So you have the options of not using the app while maintaining your secure connection or using the app, but turning off the secure browsing which will turn back on the next time you login.

I would not be overly concerned about temporarily turning off your secure browsing, but I would keep two things in mind. Do not use any application that you don’t trust. If it seems to be coming from an unreliable source, don’t use it. And secondly, avoid turning off your secure browsing on a public network, such as coffee shops, libraries, and schools. It is easier for people to access your information this way.

Remember, secure browsing only turns back on if you log off and log back in. If you are finished using that app, and wish to continue browsing Facebook, use the steps above to turn back on your secure connection.

This post is our first out of several posts about Facebook settings you should know about.  Tell us in the comments below if there is a Facebook setting you would like us to write about.

If you think this post was useful, please like it and share it with your friends!

The more you play these games, the more you earn.

As you play, you earn zPoints, which increases your zLevel and earns you zCoins.

You can earn up to 80 zPoints per game per day and 300 zPoints per day through playing all Zynga games.

First you have to connect to RewardVille through your Facebook account. This, like most games, includes giving the application access to your information.

A RewardVille bar looking like this, will be seen at the top of your Zynga game.

As you level up (through more play), you earn more zCoins, which you can now use to redeem items in RewardVille.

You can use the RewardVille bar or go directly to rewardville.com in order select your item.

Once you choose your item, you’ll be asked if you want to share a reward with friends via a post on your news feed.

After you buy your item, log into your game of choice and you should find the item waiting for you in that game’s inventory system (for example, the Gift Box in FarmVille etc.).

If you liked this article, let us know via Facebook or Twitter. While you’re there, let us know which Zynga game you are currently playing so we can give you more useful updates!