Those who use Facebook have ample opportunity to choose what to show to friends, colleagues and acquaintances, adjusting the privacy settings of the content we share.
These settings should be checked periodically: the information published on your profile can remain private or become public domain, depending on how the privacy of each individual information is set.
Nothing prevents the information and photos from being read and seen by only a few friends, remaining hidden for all the others, even if included in the contacts.
In the following guide we will show you How to adjust your Facebook privacy settings to choose what friends, relatives and strangers see on our profile.
READ ALSO: Do the quick privacy check in Facebook
1) Levels of privacy offered by Facebook
The privacy rules have been changed many times and require a new updated summary guide that, without explaining each option but to understand the logic of the relationship that one must have on Facebook with friends, close friends and strangers and on the visibility of your profile.
For all those who wonder why the friend sees X things of me while I see nothing of him, here the great guide on Facebook and the online visibility of oneself.
Facebook uses various levels of privacy involving other people who access our profile:
- Everyone: the voice that allows everyone, including search engines and non-friends, to see what we publish.
- Amici: the entry to read posts and updates only to friends in our list.
- Friends except: with this item we can let all our friends read the message except some people or groups of people.
- Specific friends: with this list we can let only one person or a group of trusted friends read the messages.
- Only me: entry intended for solitaires, since in this way the post and the update will be visible only to us.
- Personalized: essential item to be able to customize the display of posts and updates.
- Closest friends: entry to be able to share posts and updates only with certain people labeled as close friends (a special Facebook list).
Some of the privacy items are only available in the settings, such as for example Friends of friends (only available for the entry on who can send you friend requests).
To learn more about friend lists, we invite you to read our guides on how to create different facebook friend listsabout how move friends to the acquaintances list to hide them and about how avoid annoying friends on facebook without unfriending.
2) Privacy Quick Changes
Per quickly change the level of privacy on Facebook just open the profile, press the profile picture at the top right, take us to Settings and privacy -> Privacy control and act directly from there; to do faster we can also access the screen from the page on Facebook privacy controlespecially if we are already logged in.
Once this screen is open, press immediately on Who can see the content you sharewe press on Continues and apply the desired level of privacy (such as for example Amici) to all the information that we have entered in our profile.
Scroll down with the key Avantiwe press on Limit in the section Limit past posts and, in the last screen, we choose whether to add some people to the blocked contact list, as also seen in our article on how to block someone on facebook.
Other quick privacy adjustments are available by pressing on the menus How people can find you on Facebookwithout forgetting the security of the account (adjustable by pressing on How to protect your account).
3) Advanced Facebook privacy menu
In addition to the quick menu, the advanced privacy menu is also available, which in fact collects all the steps already seen in the quick menu but with greater control over each item.
To access it, press on the profile image at the top right (from our Facebook page), let’s go to the path Settings and Privacy -> Settings -> Privacy and regulate the privacy of Facebook by modifying the various options available in the sections described below:
- Privacy Quick Links: For quick control of privacy and shared content.
- Your activities: to access and modify the privacy on the activity carried out on Facebook.
- How people can find and contact you: Change the ways people find you.
- How you receive message requests: to change the options on how we receive messages.
For each of the sections listed in the list, you can choose the level of diffusion of the information, by whom it can be seen and who can interact.
4) Visibility of multimedia contents
Every photo and video posted on Facebook responds to the privacy settings of the album it belongs to unless it has special settings.
To change the settings on the photo tags let’s go to the path Settings and privacy -> Settings -> Privacy and open the menu Profile and add tagsso you can change who can see your profile, who can see your tags, and personally control the tags whenever they’re added to photos you’re tagged in (from friends or strangers).
As written on another page, you must not be tagged in any poster, collage or chain (enabling tag checking on the profile) but, above all, you have to check who can see Photos and Videos in which you are tagged.
We remind you that the profile photo will always be visible to everyone (as it should be).
As for the visibility of Photos and Photo Albums we can read our specific guide on how protect photos on Facebook, hide them or show them only to friends.
5) More Facebook privacy tips
In addition to the suggestions seen so far we can improve Facebook privacy reading the following tips:
- If you want to remove a published post, you can press the X key or change its visibility by pressing the key below the name, which can have a world icon if the post is public, a friends icon if visible only to friends, a custom icon or an Solo icon. I.
- To avoid appearing ed be visible in Facebook ads you have to go up Settings –> Cookies and leave only essential cookies active.
- When added to a groupyou can choose whether or not to show that group on the home page by going to the group page and pressing the button on the right “Change settings“.
- To keep your account safe and avoid hackers and snoopers, we advise you to Receive an email alert if someone unauthorized accesses your Facebook account and to activate thetwo-step authenticationwhich will make logging into Facebook slower but much more secure.
- If we have logged in with the Facebook account to external sites and apps we can remove the association by taking us to the path Settings and Privacy -> Privacy control and pressing up Your Facebook data settingsso you can remove apps and sites that use Facebook for login or to accumulate personal data.
- Understand the difference between deactivation and deletion of accounts; in this regard we have written a guide for unsubscribe from Facebook and the guide for disable Facebook or block it temporarily. Better to unsubscribe than leave personal information in the public domain.
By following all the advice we will really have full control over the privacy of our Facebook account.
Conclusions
We remember that you can be completely invisible on Facebookthat you can prevent being added as a friend, that you can block the status box and not let anyone write to you, that you can not be tagged in the photos and that you can not let anyone read, even anyone, what is written on the bulletin board.
And even if it is not possible know who comes to look at our pageit is possible however discover hidden data and info of each private profile.
To learn more, we can read our guide on how have a completely private profile on Facebook.