Facebook photo privacy settings

Strangers are just friends you haven't met (but who've met you).

Facebook photos are all the rage. Practically every day, I see someone who's posted a photo of themselves or their friends. And when I go out with my camera, my friends are always scared I'll post a picture of them on Facebook. This does happen, but I'll always honor takedown requests.

What happens when you post a photo on Facebook is that you can choose to have the photo visible by either:

• Friends (say you have 100 friends, then all 100 friends can see your album)
  
• Friends of friends (if your 100 friends have 90 friends each, then 9,000 people could potentially see your album)
  
• Everyone on Facebook (if your profile is public to your network, say, then anyone in that network can click through to your profile and your albums)
  

Click 'Customize' and you will also be able to specify further restrictions including:

• Some Friends (if you only have a couple of people you want to see your photos)
• Except these people (if you want everyone except your boss to see your photos)

Example: If you tag your friend Jim in a photograph and you've allowed Friends of Friends to see it, then when Jim's friend Pete gets a notification that Jim's been tagged in a photo, Pete can click through to the photo Jim's been tagged in.

But that's not all! Pete can now browse through your entire album even if Jim isn't in any more photos. In the past week I've seen plenty of albums belonging to people I don't know. Random babies, honeymoons to Uluru in Australia, Singaporean weddings, decadent parties with 19 year old girls posing seductively to the camera... and so on. And I have no idea who these people are.

So when you create your album you need to think of the parameters you're applying to the entire album, not the individual photos. Flickr allows you to edit privacy settings for each photo, but for Facebook you need to do it for each album.