Check if Your Facebook Information Is Public

It is possible for your personal data to be mined on Facebook, as shown recently when a security consultant collected the names and profile URLs for 171 million Facebook users who had publicly searchable profiles and uploaded that information as a torrent. To stop this from happening to you (or to know if your information was included in that torrent) check your settings and make the changes needed. Security is always a good thing, especially in such a large and quickly expanding environment such as the internet.

Steps

  1. Go to your Facebook profile dashboard. Click on "Account" in the upper right hand side of your dashboard.
  2. Select "Privacy Settings". Under "Basic Directory Information", click on "View Settings".
    • If the first listing called "Search for me on Facebook" is set to "Everyone", then your name and profile are publicly available and can be scooped up by anyone seeking to gather this public information. This means that your name and profile URL are probably in the aforementioned torrent.
  3. While you're at it, check if external search engines like Google and Bing are able to index your profile. That will determine if someone searching your name will see your Facebook profile in the search results. (This is one of the many steps you can take to ungoogle yourself.)
    • Go back to your main privacy settings page. At the left hand lower corner of the screen click on the "Edit Settings" button (under "Applications and Websites").
    • Click on "Edit Settings" under "Public Search".
    • If the "Enable public search" check box is ticked, it means that search engines are indexing your profile. Uncheck the box to stop this from happening. To return, click on "Back to Applications".
  4. To adjust what parts of your profile people can see from within Facebook: See How to Manage Facebook Privacy Options for more information.

Tips

  • Keep in mind that if some of your personal info does show up in the Ads section, they're for sites like entellus, which charge people money to see your personal info, which is collected from public and business records, not Facebook. While it may or may not be accurate, it's rather hard to see it all, as you have to pay about $20 to view a complete workup.

Things You'll Need

  • Facebook account

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Sources and Citations

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