Keeping your privacy on Facebook is very important. It is the largest social network, and billions of people around the world have access to your information if it is publicly available.
If you don’t know how to navigate your privacy settings or what they all mean, accidentally posting what you want to hide or sharing the wrong item becomes too easy.
Below are a few tips and reminders you can use to stay private on Facebook and regain control of what the Internet knows about you.
Review your activity history
The Activity Log is an area of ??Facebook that shows everything you’ve recently done. What you liked, what images you uploaded, events you participated in, your comments, etc. This is a central hub that you should keep track of frequently if you want to know what others see about you.
To get there, click the arrow in the upper right corner of Facebook and select “Activity Log”.
Send to specific friends only
Know who you are sharing information with on Facebook. When you post something, don’t go public unless you’re sure you want the post to be seen by literally anyone who stumbles upon your profile.
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Instead, select Friends or Specific Friends to limit the visibility of the post. You can hide your Facebook post from certain people by clicking the button below the text box; most likely it’s called Friends.
Hide your status online
Chat is built into Facebook and can tell all your friends if you are online. In fact, this is an easy way to know when you are at your computer or phone at any given time, because let’s face it: you are probably on Facebook too.
If you don’t want others to know when you are browsing Facebook, hide your Facebook status by restricting it to only certain friends or making it invisible to everyone. You can control your visibility in Facebook chat from the sidebar; select the gear icon and select Disable Active Status.
Restrict who can see your friends list
Your friends may not mind being shown publicly on your Facebook profile, but if you want to stay private on Facebook, they must be first. Luckily, you don’t have to delete your Facebook friends to hide them.
Go to the “Privacy” section of your account settings to find the option to change who can see your friends list. Change it only for certain people, or limit its visibility to only you. Now, anyone who visits your profile, whether a friend on Facebook or not, will not be able to track who you have added on Facebook.
Disable email and numbers searching
If someone knows your email address or the phone number with which you signed up for Facebook, they can find your profile using a simple Facebook search. This is true even if your phone number and email address are not even visible on Facebook!
To turn off these features, open Privacy in Settings and click the Edit link to the right of both of these items: Who can find you at the email address you provided? and Who can find you at the phone number you provided? Change them to Just Me or select friends you trust so that only they can do this search.
Stop search engines from listing your profile
Anyone who searches for your name and location on Google or another search engine is likely to find your Facebook profile. It really doesn’t take long. Fortunately, you can prevent your Facebook profile from showing up on search engines simply by changing your settings.
Under Privacy, select Edit next to “Do you want search engines outside of Facebook to link to your profile?” And then uncheck the box. Confirm by clicking the “Turn off” button.
Identify the signs other friends can see
Facebook is always a social space, but you still have the ability to control how social you want to be. One example is the ability to limit the number of people who can see what other people post on your page.
Some people like to send private messages directly to the public timeline. If you don’t like other friends seeing these messages, you can turn off this feature in the timeline and tags. Edit the Who can see what others post on your timeline? the ability to set a limit.
Stop letting anyone add things to your schedule
One really nasty thing that can happen to you on Facebook is that your friends can clutter up your timeline by tagging you with different things, maybe even photos or videos that you don’t want others to associate with you.
To fix this problem, you need to force Facebook to force you to view every post before it is added to your timeline. In the timeline and tags, edit the item titled “Do you want to check messages you are tagged on before the message appears on your timeline?” Select “Enabled”.
Delete the history of sites on Facebook
If your mobile device is configured to give Facebook access to your location, you might be shocked to learn that you can actually go back in time to see where you were based on this information. Facebook uses your location for things like ads, Wi-Fi search, closest friends search, etc.
While all of this information is confidential, it’s a little unsettling to know that Facebook has kept it. To delete your location data from Facebook, open the View Location History page, click the three-dot menu in the upper right corner, and select Delete All Location History.
It may take a while, but after reloading the page, your location data will no longer be available and will be restarted from today.
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