Check your privacy settings -- Facebook is (probably) sharing your employment history

Somewhat out of the blue, Facebook has decided to change the way it displays certain information on your profile. Not content with showing your current place of work -- whether this is real, or some clever pun you've engineered -- it now also shows your employment history.

This is not a direct change to privacy settings as it does not make public anything that had been previously set to be private. It does, however, broadcast your previous places of work to people looking at your profile. You might not like this. You might want to do something about it.

In addition to whatever description you've decided to use for yourself on Facebook, the Intro section of your profile now lists a raft of places you have said you worked at. This is something you might prefer to keep a little less public, especially if you're the sort of person who has -- for reasons best known to yourself -- listed something like the "school of hard knocks" or the "mean streets" as previous employers.

So why the change?

In a statement to the Huffington Post, Facebook said:

This is a change we made in the past week to make it easier to understand which of your work and education (school, college) fields are public. None of these fields have [had] their privacy settings changed; we're now simply showing the already-public fields in Intro. If you've already curated what you want to appear there, this change shouldn't affect you.

Thankfully, if there's anything you'd rather others didn't see, it's easily removed. On your profile page, click the Edit link in the upper right hand corner of the Intro section and uncheck anything you want to hide.

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