If you log into Facebook today, the site will ask you to review and update the current privacy settings (for the umpteenth time) This means that there have been important updates in the privacy settings of the most used social network in the world and that, if you do not check, the status and private information become public.
Facebook was born in an American college to reunite friends and hadn't foreseen, in the beginning, that it would become such a popular means of global communication.
Therefore there has always been a certain superficiality in the privacy and security settings and the social life of all members became, in fact, public for anyone.
So this year Facebook has significantly increased the options related to the privacy of the data entered on their account but for many it remained complicated and obscure with many doubts, uncertainties and fears.
Now the privacy settings have been somewhat simplified and, basically, it is simply a matter of indicating to Facebook which parts of the profile must be visible to friends, friends of friends, the public profile visible to search engines and stalkers (harassers) or other unknown people.
READ ALSO: Facebook Privacy Management: Settings and Control .
By pressing the down arrow button on the Facebook site, you can open the Settings and check the Privacy section to adjust the various options as explained in this updated and detailed guide.
1) Create friend lists
Yes, it will take some time, especially if you are already connected to hundreds of friends, but this step, although not the fastest, is quite simple, very useful and indispensable to divide who can and who cannot see certain things .
Friends lists are used to categorize contacts into various groups and since in choosing who can see things you can choose between Everyone, Nobody, Friends or personalized, it can be useful to decide each time whether to exclude a group of friends such as acquaintances, colleagues, schoolmates etc.
2) Who can see the profile and what
Once friends are divided, for each Facebook option it is possible to choose who to show what is published, profile information, photos and everything written.
The only things whose privacy cannot be changed are the cover and profile photo.
3) Who can see the address and telephone number
Writing the address and telephone number on Facebook can be useful to make yourself available in the case of job offers or meetings but clearly it is not information to be disseminated to the whole world.
To decide who can see the real contact information, then home address, telephone number and other things, you must click on Information on your profile page and then go to the "Contact information" section.
By hovering over each element, you can decide who can see some information and also put it on "Just me" to hide it completely.
4) Change of "Who can find you through search"
Facebook gives the possibility to hide in searches, both on Google and on Facebook itself.
This avoids receiving friend requests from old schoolmates you haven't seen for years or people who don't care.
Click on the "Privacy settings" menu on the Facebook home page (from the down arrow located at the top right), click on Privacy in the left menu and then change the options under the " Who can look for me" section>
5) Stop sharing Personal info with unknown applications.
Until some time ago this was a very sensitive point because apps had the freedom to capture and spy on personal data without even warning us and there was little control over dangerous and harmful apps.
Today the section of Settings> Applications is very accurate and very rigid, making it possible to limit the visibility of each app used and to quickly remove those no longer used.
It is even possible to disable applications entirely on Facebook.
6) Privacy of photo albums
On the Photos tab of the profile page, you can create Albums to then choose who can see the photos included in an album and who those of another album.
The creation of the albums is a bit tedious, but once done the first time, then you can add the photos to one or another album depending on the privacy you want to keep.
For example, we can create an album for everyone, an album for close friends, a professional album etc.
Just remember that profile pictures are always visible to everyone.
7) Check tags and photos of others
If we appear in the photos of other friends and they publish them visible to everyone, our photos appear in the special photo searches on Facebook.
In fact, we have seen that you can see hidden photos on Facebook of all even non-friends and how to search on Facebook to find everything.
The important thing to do to avoid that our photos published by friends end up around, you must activate the control of the tags in the photos, going to Facebook Settings, to the Diary section and adding tags .
Once this control is active, you can decide whether to approve the tag and make it searchable or not in the photos of others, keeping in mind that the privacy setting for that photo is decided by the person who publishes it and not by us.
8) Facebook Wall Privacy
Everything that is written by others in our diary can be seen by everyone, by friends or by lists of friends.
The option to decide who can see what others write in our diary is in the settings, in the Settings section of the diary and tags
Here you can check if friends can write on the bulletin board and see the posts published by others and authorize their publication.
You do not have to disable this possibility if you want to receive birthday greetings in your diary.
Now that the privacy settings on Facebook have been updated, you should try to look at what the profile looks like in the eyes of others, both friends and strangers and if you are found on search engines.
This way you can ensure that none of the information you want to keep private on Facebook is visible to other people.
To check what Facebook members see, who are not among their contacts and friends, you can preview the profile by pressing the button with three dots, next to the activity log button.
At the top you can write a friend's name to see what the page looks like for that specific person .
To see what your Facebook page looks like if it were found by Google or other search engines, it is better to search for it using the User Name (change in the Account settings) which compose the so-called Vanity url (the address of your personalized profile, like mine is www.facebook.com/pomhey).
You can then simply log out of Facebook by logging out and open the URL directly to find out what is visible in the search results.
After checking your Facebook profile through these simple checks, you can at least be sure that the private Facebook profile information is not being made public unknowingly.
I would like to say that this social network can no longer be considered a game for children and that the privacy settings should not be underestimated also to avoid having their identity or login login stolen.
It is absolutely worth losing even 10 minutes to make these checks because Facebook remains and will remain important, because sooner or later there will be almost everyone and because the online identity card is more important than any other certificate so it is not convenient to treat it superficially (I recommend never insult your boss or relative from Facebook!).
If you want to know a bit of anonymous stories about all the problems that can happen to those who have been reckless, I recommend reading some of the comments in the article on how to see Facebook private profiles .
