Those who fear that there are privacy problems with Facebook are right, however, they should also know that there are ample possibilities to choose what, friends and acquaintances, can read and see. It's all about knowing how to use Facebook because the information published on your profile can remain private or become public, depending on how the privacy of each individual information is set.
Nothing prevents that information and photos can be read and viewed only by a few friends, remaining hidden for everyone else, even if included in the contacts.
Facebook can easily be a very personal page where, as a result, sincere and not cold relationships can be established as you might think.
READ ALSO: Check privacy on Facebook
Unfortunately you have to waste some time with the privacy settings, rather articulated in Facebook, of which it is not easy to understand the implications and consequences (in my opinion few in the world know how to solve equations such as "the photo together with a friend who blocks me, can be seen by a third friend of his "> The problems concern the way others see" me "on Facebook, whether or not they read the comments made on the wall of other friends, if strangers can look at my photos, why if I write on another's wall, it also appears on the homepage to others, how to hide some information and so on.
The Privacy rules have been changed many times and require a new updated synthetic guide that, without explaining each option but to understand the logic of the relationship that you must have on Facebook with friends, close and foreign friends and on the visibility of your profile .
For all those who wonder why the friend sees X things about me while I don't see anything about him, here is the great guide on Facebook and the online visibility of themselves .
1) First of all, you need to stop for a moment to understand the basics, terminology and privacy settings .
Facebook uses 4 levels of privacy :
Everyone means everyone on the Internet, including search engines, including any non-Facebook user.
Friends of friends : they are the friends of our contacts.
Only friends are the contacts added and authorized to your list.
Finally, the personalized setting is used to optimize privacy in order to include or exclude specific people or friends of friends, using lists and lists.
Personalization can also hide information from everyone by putting " Just me ".
2) From the Privacy configuration menu ( Settings -> Privacy Settings from the top menu), each option can be changed by setting a level of visibility between: Public, Close Friends, Friends except acquaintances, only me, personalized.
The page is divided into three separate sections:
- Who can see my things to distinguish groups of friends from viewing posts posted on the bulletin board, comments, links, status updates, photos, the items on which the "Like" button is pressed, etc.
- Who can contact me is the section where to decide who can write us messages and who can add us to friends.
- Who can search for me, to allow our name to appear in Google searches and internal Facebook searches.
For each of the rows listed in the list you can choose the level of dissemination of information, from whom they can be seen and who can interact.
3) Privacy on the diary or personal profile
Not all privacy options are listed in the settings.
The personal profile is the page with contact information where you can write who we are, where we were born, if we are married, etc.
For each of these options it is possible to configure the level of visibility as explained in point 2.
For posts published on the bulletin board you can also change the visibility manually to make it visible only to a specific friend by pressing the padlock button.
From the profile, by clicking on the three dots next to the large button of the Activity Log, you can also check how our profile is viewed by others when found in searches by strangers or when viewed by a friend.
4) The fundamental step to having a personal and private Facebook account is to create the lists of friends that are the real foundation of privacy in Facebook.If you are among those who consider Facebook a cold and impersonal means of communication, where relationships are distant and disturbed by many bullshit, then it means that you have never created the lists of friends.
With lists, you can use your own privacy settings for each of the Privacy Settings menus.
Creating friend lists was a long and tedious task, but now you can quickly move friends to the list of acquaintances to hide them, create restricted lists on Facebook and avoid annoying friends on Facebook without removing the friendship.
5) As for the visibility of photos and photo albums, I wrote a specific guide, to protect the photos on Facebook, hide them or show them only to friends .
Each photo responds to the privacy settings of the album it belongs to unless it has special settings.
This rule does not apply to special profile or bulletin board albums.
From here you can set different privacy levels for each published photo album.
In this case, the album can either remain completely hidden or be visible only to some friends chosen individually.
NB The profile photo will always be visible to everyone.
6) As written on another page, you must not be tagged in any poster, collage or chain (by enabling the control of the tags on the profile ) but, above all, you must control who can see the Photos and Videos in which you are tagged .
People are often embarrassed when their friends tag them in compromising photos and videos that become visible to other people.
In the privacy settings, in the section elements shared by others, you can notice the item " Photos and videos in which I am tagged " and control who can see the photos in which I am tagged.
The custom setting, as for other sections, allows you to use friend lists, so as to include or exclude specific friends or specific work colleagues.
The photos in which you are tagged are always visible, even if the person who put the tag hangs and if it has been banned, until the tag is removed.
7) Many people do not want their marital status and changing relationships to be visible to others and all this personal information can be controlled from the privacy settings under " Relationships ".
If you want to set " I only " and therefore nobody can see this information, choose the Custom setting.
8) Contact information can be managed from the profile information modification section, where you can decide who can see email addresses, telephone numbers and other personal data.
In the privacy settings, you can decide who can search for us by phone number or email address .
9) Facebook friends can reveal personal information (about you) through applications, even if not used (by you).
A typical example is the application of the birthday and the sending of the automatic gift package.
Unfortunately, this also means that religious, sexual and political preferences, as well as other personal information about you, can also be revealed to outsiders.
To avoid all this you have to go to Settings -> applications and websites and manage the permissions by removing everything possible for each single application used.
By default, installed applications take every permission.
Removing unused applications is good and right.
In another article, the guide to block Facebook games and applications.
10) The list of friends is visible to everyone on Facebook by default.
In another article, we explained how to hide the friends list from others on Facebook.
11) 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 friend icon if visible only to friends, a personalized icon or just me icon.
12) Any person, both friend and non-friend, can be blocked from the page accessible from privacy settings -> Blocked elements .
Specific email addresses or names of people registered on Facebook can be blocked.
Application and game invitations, event invitations and specific applications can also be blocked.
In another article, the guide to blocking a person on Facebook and what it means for him
13) To avoid appearing and being visible in Facebook advertisements you must go to Settings -> Listings .
Set both options to "none", listings displayed by third-party applications and listings displayed by Facebook.
14) When adding to a group, you can choose whether or not to show that group on the home page by going to the group page and pressing the " Change settings " button on the right.
15) You can receive an e-mail alert if someone unauthorized accesses your Facebook account.
16) Understand the difference between deactivating and deleting accounts .
NA in this regard we have written a guide to unsubscribe from Facebook, and the guide to deactivate Facebook or block it temporarily.
Better to unsubscribe than to leave personal information in the public domain.
In conclusion, to summarize, I remember that you can be completely invisible on Facebook, that you can prevent yourself from being added as friends, that you can block the status box and not let us write anyone, that you can not be tagged in the photos and that you can not let anyone read what is written on the bulletin board.
All of this is explained in the guide on how to have a completely private profile on Facebook .
And even if it is not possible to know who comes to look at our page, it is still possible to discover hidden data and info of each private profile
