Facebook Graph Search: How to strengthen your privacy settings

The first point to make is that Facebook Graph Search doesn’t make your information available to anyone who can’t already find it.

Social networking site Facebook is proposing to end voting on changes to its privacy policies.

If your privacy settings are restricted to 'friends only', your details will generally only appear in the Graph Searches of your friends.

We say 'generally' because it's still possible for things like photos other people have uploaded of you to appear in searches.

Also, Facebook allows users to specialise their profiles so that some aspects are 'friends only' and others are 'friends of friends', or even completely public.

It's worth double-checking your privacy settings again. Here's how you do it.

How to manage your privacy settings

Go to the blue bar at the top of the page, and look for the small cog icon. Click on 'privacy settings' in the drop-down menu:

Facebook has recently added a 'Privacy Shortcuts' tab. Here you can review exactly who can see your stuff and who can contact you. You can also prevent interaction with specific people.

Where to find the privacy shortcuts tab

Go to the blue bar at the top of the page, and look for the padlock on the left-hand side.

Of course, if you want to be really sure that no one can find your personal information, the best thing to do is get rid of it from your account.

Facebook Graph Search currently allows users to search personalized information in 40 different fields – that's everything from your gender to the city you live in, to your workplace, your photos, and your 'likes' – even ones that might be five years' old and you've forgotten about.

If you want to be as unsearchable as possible, it's worth going into your archives and cleaning up anything you don't really want to be public.

One final thing: Facebook Graph Search is still in its infancy. The company plans to continue adding fields to the search terms in the weeks and months to come. This could mean anything from facial recognition search to previous status updates, so it's worth checking ALL of your history for anything you'd rather not have re-hashed as public information.

UPDATE: Facebook has told SBS users will be able to search across posts, comments and OG actions (or 'open graph' actions – thinks like follow, like, listen, watch, read) in the future.