You probably don’t need another Facebook lecture — I certainly didn’t but got one anyway from my tech-savvy, privacy-conscious mother who never fails to remind me that “anything you put up online stays online.” Love you, mom.

Posting promiscuous photos or lewd statuses is a bad idea, and this is not new information. But after this week, Facebook may have a slightly different way of handling secure information searches on the social networking site. My mother had sent me an update that I had either previously ignored or never seen: Facebook security formatting was being revamped, and the changes that those working for this powerful little website may change your future, now.

System updates are set to include:

Managing Messages

This means more control, replacing the current “Who can see your Facebook Messages” application with a more fine-tuned system of precisely identifying who can see what and for how long, at least with incoming messages. Details aren’t clear on this upgrade, which may mean Facebook is waiting for user feedback or just isn’t finished making the system.

New Product Names

Facebook claims they will soon install features like “instant personalization,” which uses information from your profile to customize your web browsing on partner websites.

Time(line) Management

The current layout allows users to rearrange the order and appearance of the timeline feature on a Facebook profile. But just because you delete a post off of your profile’s timeline does not mean that it is off of Facebook entirely. There are still three major digital locations where the information may still be posted: namely the news feed and other people’s or friends’ timelines. The information, once published, is pretty much always available through a Facebook search. To remove posts entirely from the site, you need to remember not only to delete the information from both you and your friend’s timeline, but also from both activity logs (look under privacy settings, under “Limit Audience for Past Posts”).

This should be the consistent policy from here out.

Reminders on what others can see on your Facebook account/profile

This seems pretty self-explanatory, but many years and accompanying lawsuits later, those who work in the privacy department of Facebook feel that users deserve a little update on not only changes as the site is routinely restructured, but also the constant standbys of what is and is not viewed. By liking the Facebook Site Governance Page, users can receive updates on changes to policies.

As a new (and younger) generation of social networkers create their Facebook accounts, they may not be privy to the basic understanding of how to limit exposure of a status, how to block people or how a message is a lot more private than a wall post.

How Facebook collects and ultimately uses data are part of the current proposed changes to the company’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities (SSR). The SSR is basically a code of conduct that governs the Facebook Data Use Policy. If you’ve heard any sort of controversy over ad companies, schools or even the police using Facebook, there is probably a clause about how Facebook has handled it through their SSR.

Facebook’s security team is urging users to visit the governance page to make any comments before 9 a.m. PST on Nov. 28. Facebook is doing away with open voting and favoring direct feedback from users through messages to the Chief Privacy Officer of Policy, Erin Egan, who is also set up in the following months to host webcasts that will speak to the submitted questions and comments on how Facebook secures user information. So speak now or forever hold back on posting something your future employer (or mother) wouldn’t want to see.

But if you’re still tagging yourself in bar pics and including insensitive comments on your timeline, chances are this plea for awareness will fall on deaf ears.

I am convinced that when I’m not traveling or working on a story, I have the world’s most boring Facebook profile. I don’t include my political or religious affiliations, nor do you see a home or school address. You can’t see my birth year or if I’m in a relationship. No phone number, no sexual preferences, not even any favorite quotations. If you want to know these things, ask me — I’ll tell you. I’m not paranoid — I want to get a job.

And while it is illegal in the state of Illinois for an employer to ask you for your Facebook password, public online records, computer memory and those thousand-some “friends” all make a pretty solid, if not literal, paper trail. I have nothing dark and scary in my past, but how others perceive private information is something that may jeopardize a job interview.

Renée is a senior in Media. She can be reached at [email protected].