Owning a Facebook profile has become a habit for anyone who owns a PC or smartphone, so you can stay in touch with old friends or even quickly access some sites and services via the dedicated button. With a Facebook account most people think they are sacrificing something in terms of privacy unless you decide to sign up without participating in any discussion, never clicking “Like”, never posting anything. Participating in online life on Facebook and having a lived and detailed diary of information is not so incompatible with keeping the profile private so that you can only communicate with family members and your most important friends leaving out casual friendships or people you know little about.In this guide, we will show you how to manage your privacy settings in a personalized way and above all how to make access to our profile almost completely private, so that only a few trusted people can read our posts, see our interests, and access any photos shared or in which we are tagged.READ ALSO: What friends and strangers see of me on Facebook; privacy settings guide
How to keep Facebook profile private
First, it is important to set up your Facebook profile in a clear way, if it is private or if it wants to be used as a professional promotion. The decision is very important because one thing is to publish family photos, of parties with friends or holidays and discuss football with friends, another thing is to advertise your profession, show what you do at work or talk about politics. Unless we are extremely careful, private life and professional life should be separated on Facebook.
Create friends lists
One way to do this without creating different profiles is to create lists of friends separate and pay attention, every time you publish something, who to show the shared post or image.
Complain about your work on Facebook, salary, boss, long business trip, office or the fact that you would like to sleep in the morning, it is really not recommended, especially if the boss himself is among the friends! In some cases it is true that professional activities can also be enjoyed by friends, the opposite may not be true, that is, private activities can be enjoyed by colleagues, clients or bosses. However, it is always necessary to avoid sharing interesting job offers, salary increases, important opportunities and also to tell friends how good our job is and how important we feel.
Quickly change the privacy on Facebook
Make the Facebook diary private does not, therefore, mean preventing everyone from seeing profile information and updates but prevents it from being publicly visible. The important thing, therefore, is to adjust the visibility settings so that there is no public and visible information, that is, even to non-friends. To proceed, press the top right on the hidden menu (in the shape of an inverted triangle), let’s go to the menu Settings and privacy and press on Privacy control, which compared to the past are much easier to understand and use:
- We can choose who can see the content we share
- We have a dedicated menu to protect the account from unauthorized access
- We can choose how our profile is displayed, choosing which personal information shown to all or a select few.
- Finally, we can change the settings relating to data on Facebook or the advertisements on the pages.
Alternatively, we can act the old way by going to Settings and privacy -> Settings and opening the menu Journal and tagging. From here you can activate the control of posts in which you are tagged by friends to prevent information or photos about us from being published without us knowing. In the section on “Who can see the things that are in my diary” you can check what others see in our diary and, therefore, do a check of what appears to the public. Below you can activate the control of the tags added by people to our posts.
Tag control
The check on tags, as already explained, it allows you to prevent photos or posts written in our diary from appearing automatically. This means that if you are tagged in a photo, you will need to approve, in the activity log (button on the profile page), the photos to see them appear in the diary and also see them in the list of personal photos.
All ignored photos will, in the long run, be forgotten, as if they did not exist and it will be almost impossible to recover or review them if you refuse to approve the tag and add it to your diary. In this regard, we can also read our guide Quick changes to privacy on Facebook and activity log with filters.
Hide all profile information, likes, and followed pages
Keeping information private, however, does not mean hiding it, but setting any custom visibility level that is different from “Public“. To hide the information of the profile we follow then go to the main page of the Facebook profile, click on the button Information which is located under the profile picture e we modify the privacy level of each data entered, selecting Only me or Only friends where necessary. Here we can also hide the phone number or the sentimental situation, so as to keep it private for himself or for a few trusted friends.
Another type of private information can become public knowledge on your diary and profile if you use external applications. To proceed it is therefore important to go back to the profile settings, open the menu Apps and websites and press on each application used, and installed changing its visibility from Publish ad Friends O Only me; if the app or service is no longer used we can also select them and press the button Remove.
As for the Like and Facebook pages, we can check their visibility by going to our account profile, by clicking on the tab Other by clicking on “I like it”, pressing on the three points in the section, and finally selecting Change the privacy of “Likes”, setting each item to Only me or his Friends.
For the pages and groups to which we are subscribed, we can do very little, especially if they are already public pages: if we no longer want to be associated with a group, all we have to do is bring us to the menu Groups in the menu on the left side, select the page or group to exit and press on Leave group. For the pages we follow, simply search for them in the search bar and remove the I like it; if we can’t find the page to remove we can always access the menu “I like it” (as seen above) and check if it is present there, so as to remove the preference.
Conclusions
Obtaining absolute privacy on Facebook is impossible, but we can definitely prevent strangers from snooping on our profile and making our personal information public, as well as modifying the privacy of shares and taking advantage of friend lists to choose who can read our updates. and who will not be able to read them (if they are not tagged or if we do not change the list of friends to whom it is intended)?
Always on the subject of Facebook privacy, we invite you to read our guide Hide annoying friends on Facebook without unfriending.
If, on the other hand, we have enough and want to close the account we can read the guide How to unsubscribe from Facebook and delete the profile.