Facebook’s new privacy controls have been causing some controversy in the last 24 hours. Unveiled as a way of providing users with more control over their information, the new privacy settings will in fact by default share more personal information than before.

Here’s our simple step by step guide to the new privacy controls

On logging in you will see the announcement from Facebook:

If you continue to the next step you are presented with a screen of the new privacy settings:

You might expect that Facebook would assume that you would like to keep your old settings that you had carefully chosen for privacy. You’d be wrong, they have instead come up with a list of ‘recommended’ settings on your behalf which are selected by default. The default settings are to share most of your personal information with ‘Everyone’.

The share with ‘Everyone’ feature is relatively new to Facebook and as they state above ‘Information you choose to share with Everyone is available to everyone on the internet.’

In the past you could remove any compromising or embarrassing content from your Facebook profile and that was the end of it. From now on any information you post to ‘Everyone’ could be indexed on search engines such as Google or Bing, at which point there is little chance of removing it.

Unfortunately under the new Facebook ‘controls’ there is some information that you no longer have any…. control …. over.  Your friend list, name, profile photo, home city, networks, gender and pages you have become a ‘fan’ of are all now publicly available.

Our advice is to select ‘Old Settings’ on the page above and then review what your previously chosen privacy settings actually are. You can do this by logging in to your Facebook account and going to your ‘Settings’ and clicking on ‘Privacy Settings’. Pay particular attention to the ‘Search’ settings. Make sure you de-select the ‘Allow Indexing’ box (un-checking this box will prevent search engines from accessing your publicly available information). You should also consider carefully who you want to be able to see your ‘search result’ on Facebook.

This may be a bit of a pain but you may be surprised at what information you are actually sharing (I was!), do you really want to be sharing your contact details with ‘Everyone’, or even with ‘Friends of Friends’?

Now you have done this for yourself make sure you help your friends, partner, parents and kids to do the same with their own Facebook settings.