If you think you can keep tabs on your teenager's Facebook exploits just by getting them to "friend" you, you might be in for a surprise. A new of setting privacy on Facebook allows users to customize their privacy settings so that certain people can't see their posts:
- Click on the "Account" menu in Facebook, and select "Privacy Settings".
- On the Privacy Settings page, click "Customize Settings".
- For each type of information that Facebook posts about you, click the button showing who can see it, and choose the "Customize" option.
- In the box that pops up, under the "Hide this from" heading, add the names of people who you don't want to have access to the information. If they are in your "friends list", their names will come up as you type them.
- Click the "Save Setting" button.
This can be useful if there are certain people that you find you have to friend for reasons of etiquette or personal politics, but would rather not have seeing your posts about family, work, or personal activities.
In fact, this might be a good way of screening out updates about your Facebook game activity from your co-workers' views, or even hiding some of your update types from your kids so they don't block you.
You can even control who sees each post individually. A new privacy tool on Facebook's update window, shown in the screenshot with this story, lets you override privacy settings for individual updates, links, and other posts to your profile:
You can control who sees each and every post. Before you post a status update, link or anything else, click the lock icon to choose who can see it. What you select will override your "Posts by me" setting, which acts as the default.
All this gives you a lot more flexibility about controlling who sees what from Facebook. But it also means you'll have to use old-fashioned communications skills to really keep track of what your kids are up to on Facebook
