How To Protect Your Facebook Profile From Unwanted Searches

Max Morse / Getty Images Teens and college students are finally becoming more diligent about adjusting and tightening the privacy settings on their Facebook pages.

Julie Dobrow, Director of Communications and Media Studies, at Tufts University, wrote recently on Huffington Post:

One student told me that he thought college students tended to ramp up their privacy settings and change them more frequently because "we're getting closer to being in the real world and we've all heard these horror stories of prospective employers mining applicants' Facebooks. No one wants to go into an interview and have someone tell you they saw a photo of you puking on the lawn so forget about a job with this company!"

Facebook's new Graph Search feature has now rolled out to all U.S. users. The search tool lets people search Facebook's huge amount of data to get consolidated results - including information on your likes and dislikes. All those old thumbs-ups that you gave to pictures of yourself half-naked, years ago? They're all potentially searchable by others now.

So this would be a good time to look at your Facebook privacy settings to make sure things you share don't inadvertently show up in search.