A little over a month ago, Facebook decided to revamp its privacy settings in an obvious attempt to combat Twitter’s openness and overall Google friendliness. As most Facebook users can recall, a pop-up randomly appeared that asked the user if they wanted to keep their “old” settings or go for the “new” ones. The new security settings were already checked for the user, so most people probably just clicked “save settings” without giving it much thought. Overnight, this caused a massive amount of Facebook profiles, pictures, status updates, etc. to be immediately available to the public. Not only did this make the profiles publicly accessible, but publicly searchable through Google. Therefore, people inadvertently put their “personal” Facebook lives out in public for the world to see.

This brings up the continuing discussion of what to make private and public online. We’ve all heard the horror stories of college grads being fielded on Facebook by potential employers, only to find photos of the potential employees getting sloshed at parties. We’ve also heard the stories of employees complaining about the company they work for thought their publicly available twitter account, only to find themselves fired the next day for their comments.

With all of this in mind, it’s important to decide what content to be private, and what to be public on social networks. I think it’s OK to have personal content on social networks, you just need to be smart about it. If you want to post profane status updates that you really only want your real-life friends seeing, then make sure its done in a controlled and private way. For example, to do this safely on Facebook, you’d have to make sure all your content was being kept private (through privacy settings), that you have a tightly controlled “friends” list, and that you’re not a part of any networks (i.e. school, business, etc.).

A good way to balance both private and public content is to use Facebook for private networking with friends and Twitter as a public medium for publishing your thoughts. Of course, this really all depends on how you want to represent yourself online. For example, I tend to keep most of the profanity off the social networks I use because I don’t want to be represented that way online. I don’t want to offend anyone and don’t want anything like that to harm my personal brand.

In the end, you must decide how you want to represent yourself online and stick to it. If you want everyone in the world to have access to your thoughts, posts, and multimedia content, then go for it. If you want more privacy, then make sure you go through all of your privacy settings on the particular social network and set them up in the way you see fit.

Tags: Facebook, friends, Privacy, Privacy Settings, private, profanity, ProVim, public, Settings, Twitter