With the news last week about Facebook Places (which is not universally available in all locations, and only on certain phones), it is time to take a closer look at your privacy settings for Facebook. While you are at it, you might as well look at the same for your LinkedIn account. Be prepared to spend a quiet hour or so debating the myriad of choices on both services.

Both of them have a long ways to go to make them simpler, and reek of a user interface that has awkwardly grown like topsy since they were started. And there is no guarantee that this guide will be relevant even next week, because they are constantly changing the options.

Let’s look first at Facebook. If you go into your Account/Privacy Settings, you have a main screen that shows you a grid, which right off the bat is confusing enough. There are options for four basic categories of contacts: Everyone, Friends of Friends, Friends Only, or “Other”. The other axis is different types of content, including your personal information such as your birthday (and I don’t recommend that people list their full real birthdays on Facebook for identity theft reasons), status updates, photos etc.

Facebook has its own recommended settings for this grid, or you can create your own customized privacy settings. I recommend you choose this latter route. You will see three groups of items: things that you share to others, things that others share with you, and contact info.

There are a couple of landmines in terms of privacy here. I recommend that you only share things with your friends, with the possible exception of your Websites and posts. If you are going to use Places, there is an entry at the bottom of this list that asks “Include me in ‘People Here how’ after I check in. This will let people know you’re at a particular location if people go to the Facebook page of that location or if they do a search for people near your location.

The more troubling setting is under the things that others share grouping. Think these through because this is where you can get into trouble. Do you really want to be tagged in all photos that friends post of you online? If you are a college student about to apply for your first job, maybe not. Do you want everyone to see your wall posts, even outside your network? Ditto. And the last option, “Friends can check me into Places” you should set to disable. If you enable this option, any friend could potentially check you in anywhere. You don’t actually have to be present to win, which could have unseen consequences.

Now let’s go over to LinkedIn’s settings. You will have to visit eight different screens to configure this, which again is more complicated than it should be. Some of these are simple binary yes/no choices: You can opt out of research surveys being sent your way, seeing ads, being part of their service provider directory, and whether you want to view other people’s profile photos. But a couple of these are important. Since the beginning, LinkedIn has the choice whether you want others to view your contacts information or not, what they list under the “Connections Browse” screen. I keep going back and forth on this one, but right now I have it set to no. Regardless of which you choose, your connections can still see if they share a connection with you when they search.

Another screen worth taking a closer look at is your Authorized Applications list. LinkedIn has been busy adding third-party applications (although they could be busier, if you asked me) and you may not realize how many of them can now connect to your account. Examples include automatic posting of WordPress or Typepad blog entries on your LinkedIn status page, showing your presentations in your Slideshare.net account, travel plans on Tripit, and others. If you want to add any of these applications, you have to edit your profile and hunt down the button for applications. It could be easier, which is probably why many of you don’t even know about this feature. I like the LinkedIn apps because they enable me to associate a lot of content with my profile, such as the slide decks for my speeches, where and when I am on the road, and so forth. Facebook has its own separate page to control what stuff their own apps have access to.

Finally, in a separate area are Twitter settings, where you can link the two services together and control what tweets get posted to your LinkedIn status update. Once you link them, you can share particular tweets with a special #in hashtag or share them all.

There are a lot more things to think about, including what information gets sent to your network when you add content to both services. This is why I recommend taking a chunk of time when you can think through the implications and make sure you have it all setup the way you want. Unfortunately, it should be easier than it is for configuring both services. Good luck and do share your own tips on my Strominator blog, or posting them on my Facebook page.

In keeping with my last post on cleaning up your Facebook account, today I want to talk to you about how you can regulate Facebook access across your enterprise networks. I heard a story last week about a soldier in Afghanistan who posted on his Facebook status page about the location of his next mission a few days before the actual event. Needless to say, the mission was cancelled and he was sent packing.

Your concerns might not be as life-and-death related, but just as important: do you think your employees are leaking company confidential information? Do you want to put limits on what they can do while inside Facebook, such as playing Farmville or other games? How about blocking or slowing down access during business hours, but then opening up afterwards?

I began doing some research for this topic for an article that I am writing for one of TechTarget’s web sites, and found a very rich landscape that is available to enterprise IT folks. Just about every network security product has some form of control over Facebook. Some offer more granularity than others. For example, McAfee’s Firewall Enterprise offers two different controls: one for the basic Facebook access, and one for all Facebook apps. That is nice. Palo Alto Networks takes it a step further, having these two plus four additional controls for chat, mail, posting updates, and any plug-ins too. That gives IT managers a lot of control over how they want their users to act. For example, you could restrict any posting until after hours, so that users could at least browse what their friends are doing, or keep the apps off the business network entirely, but still let people check their Facebook accounts.

Sonicwall and BlueCoat have products that can be used to restrict the amount of network bandwidth that Facebook is using at any given time. This doesn’t block the site entirely, just slows it down enough to be annoying, so that hopefully users will go do something else rather than wait for slow page uploads. For college campuses that need to free up their business bandwidth during the day, this is a good idea.

And then there are several data loss prevention products that can dig deeper into the Facebook data stream and determine if any information is leaving a corporate network that shouldn’t be – such as our army grunt’s status location update. Global Velocity’s product has a lot of granularity here and can be set similarly to the Palo Alto box for examining chat or apps traffic (or all Facebook data) specifically.

The trouble is that a single product doesn’t do everything, and you might be using a competitor’s firewall that makes it more difficult to set up these controls (I am thinking about you Cisco owners). But at least several vendors are moving in the right direction to enable these kinds of controls and at the level of detail that many of us need nowadays.