I saw this image today on my Facebook timeline.

I’ve seen it before from friends but not from someone I don’t really know.

Why did privacy start to concern me? When I started playing Facebook games. I play games like Mafia Wars, Mob Wars, Dragon Wars, Space Wars, Street Racing, Heroes and Villains, Special Forces and many, many more. They amuse me and they are addicting. The only way to move up is to have a crew, a team, a squad of people.

You can ask all your “real” friends but they have lives and aren’t about to join you. Plus you don’t really want to annoy those folks with request after request. So if you want to get the most out of the games you have to befriend people for the sole purpose of getting them on your crews. You can add them as a friend, recruit them to a game and once they accept you can delete them as friends and still have them in your crew. That’s fine but what about your personal information in the meantime? You should be protecting it. One way to do it is to create friend lists so you can organize all these new “friends”.

A friend list is very easy to create.

Just click on your friends tab and you will see on the left hand side of the screen there is an area where you will find a button that says “Make a New List”. Here is what my lists look like. I have created many of them to organize my family, friends, college friends, grade school, grad school and high school friends and then my blogging friends.

Once you click that button your next step is to give your list a name.

After you do that then step two would be to select friends. Notice the arrows on this image, you have the option to select multiple friends. Click that option, a big time saver.

Now you have a screen with a bunch of friend’s avatars, you can select all the friends you want in one fell swoop and add them to the new friend list. This is important because this is where you will organize the people you want to know your info and the people that should not know your info.

Once you have created all of your lists then you can move on to the privacy settings.

On the top right of the screen next to your name there is a drop down menu titled settings. This is where you can go and edit your privacy settings.

The Exception to the Rule is key here. With your privacy settings you can exclude an entire List of friends from being able to see your private information. That is why making a list is so important and a time saver.

So you’ve set the privacy settings for all of the friends that you have currently, but what about new friends. What is the easiest way to put them into your custom lists and thus protect your privacy.

The image above is of one of my new “friends” I don’t know this guy from a hole in the head but he plays Mafia Wars so I’m going to give him a shot, but he goes into my Limited Profile group. He doesn’t need to know my particulars.

See also that this new friend is in my Games list. With the Games list I can see which people are actually interested in playing games and thus will no longer annoy those people who do not want to play any Facebook games.