Facebook is a great way to connect with people, both personally and for business reasons, but you need to be careful about what you post and who you let see it. Once something is public on the internet, there is really no way to "reel it in" - it's out there forever. In this article, we're going to look at a few things you should do to improve your privacy on Facebook.

The first step to making your Facebook experience more secure is to turn on browsing on a secure connection. By default, Facebook doesn't use a secure connection after you log in. The login page is secured but after that, it's not.

This means that if you're on a public wireless network anybody "sniffing" the data could potentially take over your connection and pretend to be you. Tools like Firesheep make this easy to do for anyone, even if they're not technically oriented. By turning on the secure connection option in your Facebook privacy settings, you'll always be connected securely (https:// rather than http://) so all your data is hidden from prying eyes.

It's also important to go through your privacy settings and really think about what you want to be publicly visible. Do you want your photos, status updates and other information to be visible to anyone searching for it, or only people with whom you're connected?

Again, once something is available publicly, it can be hard to reverse. Even if you change your profile to limit it later on, all your information could already be indexed by Google and other search engines, making it very difficult to get rid of.

You can also adjust some settings for Facebook Ads, which affect how your name is attached to those ads. Facebook's social ads will show your name alongside an ad for a Facebook Page or another website that you have "liked." If you don't want your name to show up there, you can turn this off in the Facebook Ads settings in your account profile.

If you're using Facebook for both business and personal reasons, it's important to keep all these things in mind. While you might want everything you post to your business' Page to be visible publicly, chances are you don't want that same visibility for your personal information.

By going through and tweaking the default security settings (which aren't particularly strong) you can help to "lock down" your personal information while maintaining a public presence for your business.