Likes, Pokes, Comments and Tags - few years back one could get bewildered with these terms, but youngsters these days know pretty well what they stand for. Without overstating the facts one can safely say that Facebook (FB) has emerged as the most popular social media platform among the youngsters in India. According to the latest statistics India, with more than 3.8 lakh FB users, stands third in the world and is set to wrestle the second position soon.
These figures also show that about 47 percent of online population in India is logged into FB.
But much we may appreciate the social media platform and the benefits of being on it, FB does pose a challenge. Indiscriminate use of FB may leave your personal information up for grabs. What more? The information that should be kept personal might get into public domain, much to your chagrin.
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But you need not panic; if these issues are bothering you, then FB does give you options to safeguard your account as well as personal information.
After logging into FB, each time you navigate through your account, like checking your wall or commenting on your friend's photo, your account information, along your password, will be exchanged between your computer and the server. Because of this, irrespective of the complexity of the password, there is a chance of your password getting compromised. To negate this possibility, you can opt for ‘Secure Browsing' option. You can enable ‘Secure Browsing' in ‘Security' tab on the ‘Account Settings' page.
Earlier, FB gave just a few options when it came to controlling the accessibility of your information. But of late FB has come up with an interesting feature to address this problem. All you have to do is to create various lists, like school friends, colleagues at work, family members and so on according to your requirement.
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This option is available on your homepage itself. You can then add people to these lists. A friend can be placed in multiple lists too.
Once the lists are created, the next step becomes quite easier. Whenever you update your account or share a post or comment, you can specify which friend can view it by using customise option. The button to do this is placed conveniently by the side of the ‘Post' button. Click on the dropdown button that is placed by the side of post button and select ‘Customise' option and check the lists that you would allow to see your updates. If you do not select a list, by default the posts will be visible to everyone.
This will ensure that none of ‘those' inappropriate photos or updates will be viewed by the ‘wrong' people. You can also control the settings to decide ‘who can access what' by permanently changing the options in ‘Privacy Settings' page.
FB was started with the objective of offering an open platform in the virtual world where you can literally ‘hang out' with your friends. You can see what your friends are doing and even what their other friends are up to these days.
FB also encourages you to be yourself on the page, which means it discourages people from putting out proxies or fake profiles online. The logic behind this is that when your friends and family members start monitoring you, that very fact will put your behaviour in check.
Of course you cannot use all the fancy words that you used when you know that your friends or family members can follow them up.
The degree of openness that FB gives you is quite high, but with this freedom comes the responsibility.