Prevention is better than cure!-An old maxim which holds true, even on Facebook! Cyber crime is in booming phase and almost every other day we hear stories of people being harassed by obnoxious messages, mails, wall posts etc. But, these can be prevented and only you can make it happen!

If you go through the Privacy settings on Facebook, you will find that there are a zillion steps through which you can customize the sharing of information on your profile. I will briefly run you through a few of them.

1. Friend lists: Through this feature, you can create and manage friend lists and obviously control and monitor the information that you wish to share with specific friends.
2. Invisible on Google: You may choose to ‘Not appear’ in Google indexing and other search engines because it lets public access your information.
3. Remove yourself from Facebook search results: If you do not want others to know that you are on Facebook, you can easily remove yourself from Facebook search.
4. Avoid embarrassment: If you want to avoid being embarrassed by appearing in tagged photos; you can easily evade it by restricting the people whom you share your tagged photos with.
5. Protect your photos: You can restrict access to your photos by hand picking your friends. Only friends will be able to view your photos.
6. Restrict Status updates: If you don’t want to share your status updates pertaining to your personal life with everyone, click and pick the people who can view your status updates.
7. Control information accessible to applications: Applications that you have added to your profile, for example Birthday reminders, read your information and pass it on to your friends. You need to control the information that they access.