Facebook tip: Do damage control on unwanted photos

On Facebook, many people struggle with online reputation management, as they balance their personal and professional lives. They find their "friend" lists populated with both personal friends as well as colleagues and bosses. The good news: Because Facebook has remarkably granular privacy settings, you can control what people see on your profile.

But just like a celebrity being followed by determined Hollywood paparazzi, there is one thing you can't control as a Facebook user: a picture that a friend takes and posts, tagging you by name, whether you like it or not.

The standard for getting a Facebook picture removed entirely is a hard hurdle to jump: the social network will not take a picture down unless it violates the company's terms of use for uploading content. In the company's own words, that means you can't do the following: "upload, post, transmit, share, store or otherwise make available any content that we deem to be harmful, threatening, unlawful, defamatory, infringing, abusive, inflammatory, harassing, vulgar, obscene, fraudulent, invasive of privacy or publicity rights, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable."

In other words, just because you aren't thrilled that there's an incriminating picture of you partying with your friends posted to the site, Facebook isn't likely to waste a lot of their time taking the picture down.

But don't despair. You can hide behind the relative anonymity of the 10 billion photos that have been added to Facebook. When users upload photos, they typically tag the people in them. This allows for photos to become a viral element of Facebook: when you are tagged in a photo, that information is broadcasted to your friends' newsfeeds, where they can click on it and view it.

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