Let’s face it, we all have an embarrassing photo that we don’t want people to see on Facebook.  Maintaining privacy on Facebook is important because recruiters, teachers, bosses and college admission committees are highly likely to look at your profile and make judgments about your professionalism based on what they can see. There are many ways to customize your privacy and security on Facebook, but here are 20 tips to get your started:

1.) See what your Facebook timeline looks like to a specific friend or the public.

Facebook has a feature that lets you view what your profile looks like to a specific friend or to the public.  To access this feature, go to your Facebook profile and click on the drop-down gear icon at the top-right of the website.  After clicking on “View As…”, you will see what your profile looks like to the public. When you click on “View as Specific Person,” you can type in the name of one of your friends to find out what your profile looks like to him or her.

All of your Facebook friends can be separated into different lists.  This allows you to customize who you can share your content with.  For example, I put all of my family members into a list called “Family.”  When I want to share status messages, photos, links, and albums that are related to an upcoming family reunion, I can ensure that only my family members see this content.

Facebook can use your “Likes” as a way to advertise for brands.  If I “like” the Applebee’s Facebook Page, then Facebook would be able to show my profile photo and a tagline that says something along the lines of “Your friend Amit likes Applebee’s, check out the Applebee’s Facebook Page to learn about our newest lunch combo.” To block Facebook from doing this, go to the “Ads” section of your “Account Settings.” Go to the section that says “Ads and Friends,” hit edit and then select “No One” where it says “Pair my social actions with ads for.”

There is a way to set up a default group of people that can see all of your future posts.  Go to your “Privacy” settings under “Account Settings” and select “Who can see my future posts?” If you want to make everything you do on Facebook public from now on, select “Public” under the settings. By selecting “Friends”, only your friends will be able to see your future posts.  You can also change it to specific groups and lists as we talked about in Tip #2.  In Tip #6, you will learn how to let all of your friends except for a limited group of people from seeing all of your future posts.

Did you know that you have the ability to review statuses, photos, links and other content that your friends tag you in before they appear on your timeline?  This feature is great to have if you have a friend that notoriously tags you in embarrassing photos, videos, statuses or links.  You can add this preference by going to the “Timeline and Tagging” within “Account Settings.”  You will notice a section there called “Who can add things to my timeline?” Enable the feature that says “Review posts friends tag you in before they appear on your timeline.”

In tip #2, I encouraged you to create a list of different groups of friends, including one called “Family.” I also strongly recommend that you create a group to limit certain people from seeing all of your personal Facebook content.  After all, you do not want photos of yourself at a bachelor party or News Year’s party surfacing on your boss’ Facebook News Feed.  I recommend adding certain friends to a group called “Limited Profile,” “Restricted,” “Limited,” or any other similar name.  You may have also noticed that Facebook created a restricted suggested list name automatically called “Restricted.”

By default, all of your friends can see everything on your timeline.  You can restrict certain people from seeing the content on your timeline by going to the “Timeline and Tagging” settings under your “Account Settings.” Click on “Edit” where it says “Who can see posts you’ve been tagged in on your timeline.” You can select options like “Only Me,” “Friends,” “Friends of friends,” your lists of friends and “Custom.”  Custom allows you to specify only certain individuals, lists, or all of your friends except for a certain list.

2.) Group friends into lists to customize who can see your content.

You can add your Facebook friends into different groups by going to your profile and clicking on “Friends.”  Next to the profile photo of your friends, you will notice a box with the word “Friends” and a checkmark next to it.  After you click on that box, you can add your friends into different lists.  If you want to create a new list, then you can click on “Add to another list…” and then “+ New List.”

Once your lists are created, you can adjust who you want to share your content with from the posting option under “Update status” that is at the top of your profile and News Feed.  If you want to learn how to share content with all of your friends except for a certain group, refer to tip #6.

3.) How to opt out of social ads.

Currently Facebook does not give third party applications or ad networks the right to use your name or picture in ads, but they might do that in the future. You can opt out from this now though.  In the “Ads” settings within your “Account Settings” change your preferences to “No one” where it says “If we allow this in the future, show my information to” under “Third Party Sites.”

4.) Set up who can see your future posts.

5.) Review posts that friends tag you in before they appear on your timeline.

6.) Create a default list of friends that you want to prevent from seeing your whole profile.

This is the group that you want to hide all of your future posts from.  You can add people to the restricted group by clicking on “Friends” from your Profile and then adding those individuals with checkmarks to the restricted list.

After you are done creating the restricted list, then I encourage you to refer back to Tip #4 and  customizing your future posts to be seen by all of your friends except for your restricted list.  You can easily change around the privacy of everything that you are tagged in after it is posted to your profile just in case you want have that specific content become visible for your friends or the public.