[FAQ]

Hello,

My 14-year-old daughter just made her own Facebook account to keep up with her classmates. I want to give her some freedom, but I am also very worried about her privacy and safety online. I looked at the ‘Privacy Settings’ page and there are so many options, I don’t know where to start!

Can anyone please share a simple list of the most important, essential settings we should check and configure? For example, how to make sure only her real friends can see her posts, and how to control who can tag her in photos. I just want to set it up in the safest way possible. Any advice is greatly appreciated.

[Jeff Bullas]

Proactively setting up these boundaries is one of the most important things you can do for a teen online.

The Critical Three: The three most essential settings to configure are setting the default post audience to ‘Friends’, enabling ‘Timeline and Tagging Review’, and limiting friend requests to ‘Friends of friends’.

These settings work together to give your daughter complete control over who sees the text, image, and video content that makes up her online presence.

The best place to start is by sitting down with your daughter and going through the ‘Privacy Checkup’ tool together, as it walks you through the key options. First, ensure her default audience for all future text posts and photos is set to ‘Friends’, not ‘Public’. Second, you must turn on both ‘Timeline Review’ and ‘Tag Review’; this means any time a friend tags her in a photo or a post, she has to approve it before that content appears on her timeline, giving her veto power. Finally, change the setting for who can send friend requests from ‘Everyone’ to ‘Friends of friends’ to reduce contact from strangers.

Cheers,

Jeff

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