Check the privacy level of your Facebook account

If you have been worried lately about what information that you have included in your Facebook account might be accessible to people other than your Facebook friends, wonder no more. Here are a couple of simple tools that check your privacy settings and report back.

Privacy Check is a Facebook application that calculates your privacy score:

Facebook does not let you hide all you information, so a perfect 21/21 score is impossible. Most people who have locked down a lot of the information will get a 15/21 score – if you don’t have any “friends”, you didn’t specify your gender or “liked” anything, you can score higher. While the last two mentioned type of information is really not required, if you haven’t got any friends on Facebook – why did you set up an account in the first place?

The application offers also some helpful links regarding privacy on Facebook (DOs and DONTs, Facebook’s privacy guide and tools, etc.). Every type of data has also a handy “view raw data” link that lets you see just what particular data is exposed.

Facebook Privacy Scanner is an independent and open tool for scanning your Facebook privacy settings.

The scanner checks if you are opted-out of the Instant Personalization feature; who can see your personal and contact information, friends, tags and connections; check if your friends are able to accidentally share your personal information; and if there is an application you use that could leak your information:

Armed with this information you can effectuate changes that will allow you to reclaim your privacy.

Conclusion
For those people who know exactly what they are doing on the Internet at all times, these tools will not reveal much. On the other hand, for people who don’t know the first thing about privacy or security on the Internet, they can be a valuable wake-up call.