How to use privacy settings on Facebook?

What are the settings to consider when setting up a Facebook account with / for a child?

• I'm curious about the security and privacy of a child in setting them up with their own Facebook profile. Edited to clarify given the first few answers Looking for the technical settings; that is, how to set Facebook for a child's use of the site.

• Answer:

  I am not a parent. However, my qualifications for answering this question are that my parents are incredibly security-conscious (I thought of this in much less flattering terms when I was a pre-teen/teenager, e.g. this xkcd classic: http://xkcd.com/743/), and neither my sister nor I did anything dramatically stupid on the internet growing up, so what they did must have worked. I'm also not going to make this incredibly detailed with respect to Facebook's current privacy setting options...because, knowing Facebook, they probably won't be the current options for all that long. Make sure your child's phone number and address are hidden, and that total strangers cannot peruse your child's photos, friends, or wall posts. This first part is just basic, but also make sure you take advantage of Facebook's network and friend-of-friend privacy customization options to allow your child's friends and acquaintances to be able to contact them, while protecting them and their friends from the possibility of creepy people who want to dig through their information. A good way to do this is to hide all of the profile to strangers, including the profile photo, unless that person actually friend requests you. Ask your child what functions of Facebook his/her friends use. (Don't ban the use of various features out of hand.) Decide whether you're comfortable with the level of exposure to strangers that use of those features entails (e.g. public groups or applications). Talk to your child about restrictions and how to be cautious. Your efforts are very likely to meet with a blank stare and abject failure if you try to prevent your child from using Facebook, or any other social networking tool, in the same way that his/her peers do, because it stinks to be left out. Don't make rules you can't enforce, and don't try to enforce rules by invading your child's privacy: e.g. "You can't play Words With Friends, and I want to see you log in so I know you're obeying me." I know some parents think they should get their child's password. What you do about this depends on the age of your child, but I never saw a measure like this having the desired effect. The friends of mine whose parents tried to pull stuff like this basically shrugged it off and became extremely accomplished liars. You might think you're doing something, but your child is not above having multiple Facebook profiles--I know some people who had two even in college, one for friends and one for employers. Your kids are smart, and will figure out that kind of stuff very easily. Feel free to explain that the internet has creepy people in it, and that you want your child to keep some safety precautions in mind. Your child probably knows that there are creepy people on the internet, so explain rationally, rather than by bombarding them with the horror stories you read about in last week's news, unless you want them to look acutely embarrassed and/or start screaming, "I KNOW THAT ALREADY AND I'M NOT STUPID" and storm off. Focus on what you want them to do, instead. If your child has objections, ask why. You may be preventing them from using Facebook in a way that their friends do, e.g. "But there's nothing wrong with tagging our location in photos!" This obviously does not mean you have to give in--you're the parent! However, consider whether you can mitigate the risks, perhaps by using extremely strict privacy controls, to make it okay for the kids to tag their photos from dinner at Chili's. Also, maybe your kid has a point. One example from my childhood: my parents initially had very strong objections to my putting my high school on my (blush) Myspace profile, which I thought was stupid, because (a) everyone I knew did it {not a good reason} and (b) I was an athlete for a pretty good team at the regional and state levels, so my hometown, age, and high school routinely appeared in local news copy online, anyway. {much better reason, which my parents found acceptable} Your rules might be broken no matter what you do, but if you've explained your concerns well and helped your kids understand internet security, then they will be well-equipped with a gut sense of when something feels wrong, and they will know when to get out of whatever they're doing. And that's the most important part. Social networks change, but the rules for protecting yourself are basically the same.