Facebook privacy settings change almost as often as the weather these days. As Facebook tries to become more ‘Twitter-ish’, your privacy often gets lost in translation. Gone are the days of a simple public and private profile. These days you can think you are private but you’re often very, very public. Here’s how to deal with Facebook and its rapidly deteriorating concern for your privacy.

The first simple step is to set up at least one other Facebook profile. I have four, in case you’re wondering. Three are legitimate, more or less, while the fourth is just for fun. What is the use of having more than one Facebook profile? Well, depending on whether you are friends with yourself or not, you can try different privacy settings to see what’s private, what friends of friends can see and, most importantly, what’s open to the public.

By keeping at least one profile unfriended by all of the other profiles, you’ll be able to see the effect of the changes you make. If one of your friends (really yourself) is a friend of one of your other profiles, you can check on what Facebook keeps private and what it spreads around to friends of friends.

With this simple trick, you’ll be able to become a privacy maven (expert) on Facebook. The side benefit of this is that you’ll have lots more friends to play games with and share extra servings of whatever you’re cooking!

Over the next few days I’ll be writing more about Facebook and how to tune the privacy settings to match your personality. If you’ve got something to hide, this is where to read about how to keep it hidden.

Thanks for reading!