10 Solid Tips to Safeguard Your Facebook Privacy
Facebook statistics show that it has 250 million active users each with an average 120 friends. More than 1 billion photos are uploaded every month by its users, over 70% of whom use applications like games and quizzes in Facebook. Unfortunately, most users don’t know the implications of entering personal information, making friends, and playing games on Facebook.
This guide will show what you can (and cannot) do to safeguard your Facebook privacy.
1. Organize Friends in Lists
What do you do when your boss, mother-in-law, or a casual web acquaintance sends you a friend request on Facebook? Use Friend Lists. Friend Lists are the foundation of your Facebook privacy settings. Select Friends from the top menu, and use the Create link to create friend lists like Co-workers, Family, College Friends, etc. Your friends can’t see your lists, so you can name them whatever you like.
Tip: On your left sidebar, all your friend lists may not show up by default. Click More to see all of them, and drag and drop those you want above the separator.
2. Customize Profile Privacy
Click Settings > Privacy Settings > Profile. Select which parts of your profile will be seen by whom.
If you choose Customize in the drop down, you can be more specific. This is where the Friend Lists you created before become really useful.
Also go to the Contact Information tab and choose how you want your contact information to be shared on the Internet.
3. Set Facebook Privacy Level of Photo Albums
On the Photos tab of your profile page, click Album Privacy. Here again, you can use your Friend Lists to set the privacy for each photo album.
Note that your profile pictures go into a special album that is always visible to ALL your friends.
4. Restrict Search Visibility
Click Privacy > Search to set your visibility when someone searches Facebook for people. This is an important way to safeguard your Facebook privacy. You can also select what will be visible in the search results.
5. Control Automatic Wall Posts and News Feed Updates
Your actions in Facebook such as comments, likes, appear as highlights on ALL your friends’ home pages. You cannot use friend lists here, only turn them on or off.
Go to Privacy > News Feed and Wall and choose whether you want your boss or ex-girlfriend to know that you’re in a relationship.
6. Set Facebook Wall Privacy
Go to your profile page, click Options > Settings under the status box.
Here you can control whether your friends can post to your Wall, and who can see the posts made by your friends.
7. Avoid Appearing in Advertisements
Facebook has two types of advertisements: third-party and Facebook. Third-party advertisements are currently not allowed to use your pictures, but there is a setting to disallow it if it is allowed in the future. Go to Privacy > News Feed and Wall > Facebook Ads tab to turn this off.
The Facebook ads shown to your friends are about ‘social actions’ like becoming a fan of something. You can turn this off at the bottom of the page.
8. Protect Yourself from Friends’ Applications
Go to Privacy > Applications, and click the Settings tab and uncheck all the boxes. These settings control what information about you is visible to applications installed by your friends. By default, these are set to visible. This means that your religious, sexual, and political preferences, pictures, etc. are readily available to one of the million worldwide Facebook application developers, each time any of your friends takes a quiz, plays a game, or runs any other Facebook app. This is obviously a Facebook privacy issue.
This is the most commonly misunderstood aspect of Facebook privacy. These settings control what applications installed by your friends can see about you, even if you don’t install the application yourself.
Why is this important? Because these settings will not change anything about what you are sharing with the applications you install yourself. For that, go to the next step.
9. Privacy from Your Applications
There is no way to control what applications see about you; it is an all-or-nothing affair. Take this quiz developed by the American Civil Liberties Union to check what anonymous application developers can know about you and your friends each time you take a quiz.
The Burton Group’s Identity Blog features the Facebook Privacy Mirror, an application that you can use to find out what applications know about you and your friends. If you really want to see exactly what profile data of each of your friends is visible to application developers, Privacy Mirror shows it in detail.
The only thing you can do is to authorize only those applications you require and trust. Go to Settings > Application Settings from the top menu. Change the drop-down from Recently Used to Authorized. Here you can see all the applications you have authorized to get access to ALL your profile information. Remove the ones you no longer need.
Also check the list of applications Allowed to Post and Granted Additional Permissions to remove unwanted ones.
10. Quitting Facebook? Delete, Don’t Just De-Activate Your Account
You can easily deactivate your account in Facebook from the Settings page. But deactivation will retain all your profile information within Facebook, including pictures, friends, etc. If you want to permanently delete your Facebook account, click here to submit a deletion request. Note that:
- There is an unspecified delay between submitting your delete request and actual deletion.
- If you login to Facebook, your deletion request is automatically cancelled.
- There doesn’t seem to be any way to confirm that your request was completed.
- Even after permanent deletion, Facebook says that copies of your photos may remain on their servers for technical reasons.
Also, note that once in a while, there is news of a Facebook hack or leak that can expose your information on the Internet. It is better to be safe than sorry by avoiding using Facebook for anything that may embarrass you.
I hope this article gives you a better understanding and insight into Facebook’s privacy. Have any questions or concerns? Liked the post? Please tell us in the comments!
(By) Mahendra is an Editor at Techmeme, tweets as @ScepticGeek and blogs at Skeptic Geek.
great tips….thanks alot. this helped alot.
hi!
as I can, for example. Published today, a photo for my family, tomorrow, for my colleagues. You can not choose on board, but you can not
?
Thanks, this was very helpful!
if I want to share a story or a link with only a couple of friends, this is not possible?
Alex,
You can do this in two ways:
1. Create a custom Friend List and use it for the Settings>Privacy>Profile>Status and Links option. However, with this method, you can’t choose a custom list every time you update your status or share a link.
2. Make your profile public. Go to Settings>Privacy>Profile and set Profile to Everyone. After you do this, you will see a lock icon below the status box. Using this, you can select a custom list each time you update status or share a link. However, this puts your profile information on the Internet and is not recommended.
Hi!
(Comments wont nest below this level)If, for example, only today, I want to share a message with you. I customize privacy settings each time, for any change
You can just send a private message to the person or persons.
This is a godsend, I posted a link on my wall so that others can benefit too.
lucky for me i dont use facebook much …
and have less than 100 friends … hehe …
anti-social … ??? guess not …
Thanks… They were very helpful
For item #6, you CAN restrict who see the posts to your wall (Stories Posted by Friends -> ‘Who can see posts made by friends’ section) – it’s done through the Settings -> Privacy settings -> Profile -> Basic -> Wall Posts. Even though it doesn’t explicitly state this, the exceptions you put in here do carry over to the wall -> settings link you mentioned in #6 – you just can’t edit these exceptions from your own wall.
Could you clarify number 8 please? I can’t find that particular set of options in privacy settings anywhere. Thanks!
Anders,
Hover your mouse (don’t click) on “Settings” in the top menu. You will get a drop-down in which you can select “Privacy Settings”. On that page, you can select “Applications”.
Many thanks for this important note just in time after a friends account on facebook got hacked. You safe people many inconveniences with your contribution and show sophisticated ways to protect oneself against these computer-nerds who feel satisfied when they can harm others.
great post! I have written a few blog posts about creating and using friend lists to stay in control of how much various people see, but I think I missed the photo album privacy tweak (#3).
Great, I have known all of them, except Nr.8, which I need so much. Thank you.
Yowza, had no idea that facebook could be using your photos for their ads. Thats crazy! Gotta go turn that stuff off, and maybe not upload so many pictures…
Great post, but this site needs a add to facebook button, and what’s with the two comments via email checkboxes?
We were discussing this two days ago. Great article, thank you for that! The groups feature really rocks and saves headaches
Great article. I’m hoping I absorbed enough to control the info I send and receive. Had no idea there was so much to evaluate. Social networking can be a valuable tool but an enemy as well.
Why isn’t there a way to approve tagged pictures before they appear on your page, or in your photos added by others section????
Is there any way to prevent some friend list seeing my specific status updates ?
@Sydney: In Settings > Privacy Settings > Profile, you can select who can see “Photos Tagged Of You”. Also, you can go and untag yourself from those photos as well.
@Ujjwol: See my response to Alex above.
Interesting that privacy on Facebook bothers not only its users but also people who are seriously involved in scam – fraud – identity theft research, see here: http://digg.com/d314e2k
Mahendra, I want to choose a custom list every time I update your status or share a link but not losing my profile privacy. Is that possible ?
@Mahendra: I understand that, but the problem is, people may tag me in photos, which show up on my wall, etc., before I’ve logged on and had a chance to untag them! So they may be sitting on my page for the world to see before I had any say in the matter.
@Ujjwol: Unfortunately, not yet. Making the profile public activates a beta version of the “Publisher” (the module used to update your status). If this beta is later released to everyone, we *may* be able to do what you wish.
@Sydney: In Settings > Privacy Settings > Profile, for “Photos Tagged Of You”, just select “Only Me” and “None of my networks”.
Awesome! Thanks for this helpful post. I have been looking for something like this for a while.
Thank you for these tips. I would like to follow your counsel of grouping my friends in lists, but I cannot find the “Lists”!
How can I stop other people from seeing my photos when my friend has been tagged in them? She does not have any privacy settings enabled over who gets to see photos of her. Will this automatically mean that just about anyone can view my photo albums?
Jen:
If you mean your friend has uploaded photos of you and tagged you in them, you can untag yourself from the photos, so they are no longer linked to your profile.
As long as you are not tagged in the photos, nobody can view the photo from your profile. The photos will be visible to those browsing your friend’s profile, however they will not be tagged to your name and profile on Facebook.
I have Facebook, but use it maybe 3-4 times a week. Fucking attention whores piss me off.
Excellent post. I really enjoyed it and it should be read by everybody before signing in Facebook.
Excellent, thank you.
Many online marketing companies are rendering Facebook to promote their business and generate traffic to their site. But doing excessive activities can result in getting your profiles banned. Let’s know what “not-to-do” when marketing via Facebook
http://tinyurl.com/ydpwxub
Is there a setting were i can vet everything posted on my facebook? Like i get an email showing me what has been put then i can ok it?
good shyt maynard. keep up the good work!!!
thanks for the info.. one question.. after fiddling with my privacy settings it seems (after viewing my profile from a friends perspective) my wall itself is completely blank.. seems like an easy fix but can’t seem to find it. thank for your help
a lot of great info here, but
for some reason when I choose “customize” in the drop-down menu (see step 2) I do not get a “some friends” option in order to use the lists I just created – it does show when I choose “customize” for the photo sharing
can anyone explain this to me??
to clarify, it allows me to chose who CAN NOT see my info (on an individual/list basis), not who CAN, as shown in your instructions (which would be much more convenient) -did their design change since your article was published?
D: You have not specified for which drop-down menu you are selecting, but I think I get your point.
To clarify, the “Some Friends” option is NOT available for Profile, Basic Info, and Personal Info sections. For those, you can use Friend Lists in the “Except” list.
The “Some Friends” option to let you specify which Friend Lists CAN see info is available for Status and Links, Photos, Videos, Wall Posts, Education and Work Info.
Hope this helps!
(Comments wont nest below this level)FACEBOOK IS NOT SECURE I AM ABOUT TO DELETE MY ACCOUNT.
PLEASE PROVE THE OTHER WAY IN THE BELOW CASE:
1- I set the privacy on my Album01 to viewable by my friends ONLY.
2- One of my friends (Friend01) commented on one of the pictures.
3- Another friends (Friend02) was tagged in one of the pictures.
RESULT:
- All friends of Friend01 who can see his comments can now see the picture and the entire album.
- All friends of Friend02 who can see his tagged photos can see the photo and the entire album.
THERE IS NO WAY TO MAKE FACEBOOK SECURE. I was able to see very private pictures and albums via “comments” and “tags”.
Great stuff,,,,brilliant,,,very helpful,and easy to follow,,,,,,Thanks,,,,,
This is a really useful and informative checklist for Facebook privacy and security. Thanks for publishing. I plan on sharing a link to this page with my Fans!
I need you please put some were on the mail (next) mail to read past to the next
Hi- Brilliant post very useful and have shared with my friends.
I’m still a little confused by photo privacy. Is it possible to restrict which of my friends can (1) see a specific photo that has been uploaded by a friend in which I am tagged, or if that is not possible then only allow friends to see photos of me that I upload…but not to see the photos in which I’m tagged in other peoples albums? I cant see how to do either of this. Thanks
@Sweeny: Yes you can. In Privacy Settings > Profile Privacy > Photos Tagged Of You will allow you to specify who is allowed to see photos uploaded by your friends in which you are tagged.
There is a facebook app that helps protect privacy. i haven’t tried it — have you? I read about it in this article about facebook apps for parents. scroll down in the article to see the list of apps.
http://www.lawfirms.com/facebook-sex-offender-apps.html
is there a way to tell who tagged me in a picture?
Suppose an old enemy starts befriending some of your facebook friends. Now you have mutual friends with your enemy. Every time you and a mutual friend comment in the same thread, your enemy can see your comments. What can be done to prevent this? The only thing I can think of is to block your mutual friends, which is not desirable.
Really annoying because I had to sign up to facebook just to see some invites and have a look round it but I have discovered the following……..
There seems NO WAY to stop anyone from…
1) Sending me messages through the facebook portal (rather than a conventional email) – this means I have to annoyingly log on and visit facebook anytime someone sends a message that they could have otherwise just sent as bog standard easy to read conventional email.
2) It is Impossible to cloak or prevent other users (that facebook call my friends) from actually seeing my other ‘friends’, my basic info, my personal info, status and links, or wall posts, on my own profile. there is NO setting for “only me” to see these. Only Education Info, Work info, photos tagged of me and videos tagged of me can be wholly and completely cloaked by using the only me setting strangely only provided for these.
Remember “It’s NOT the FACE you have to f***; It’s the f*** you have to FACE, If you can’t FACE the f***, then DON’T f*** the FACE!!!!
Stick to grooming dogs….don’t let “personal websites” evolve into these membership only social engineering con tricks!