With the recent scandals that have involved Facebook in the last months of 2018 (the case collected by Cambridge Analytica, it is necessary to check all Facebook's Privacy settings, to know who can read our writings, who can see our photos and who can use our personal data for commercial or electoral purposes or for any other purpose. Facebook, which with the privacy management options has never been very clear, has tried to make order in this 2018 so as to allow even the least experts to understand what the various settings mean in order to change them more easily. To tidy up, we see here the most important parts of the Facebook privacy settings, in order to control what is visible to the outside, friends and application managers, and what instead can be hidden and kept private.
READ ALSO: What friends and strangers see about me on Facebook
First of all, the page for adjusting and controlling Facebook's privacy settings is always reachable from this link, //www.facebook.com/settings?tab=privacy and is also present in the settings of the Facebook application for iPhone and Android .
as we will see, however, not all Facebook privacy management options can be controlled from the settings page.
1) How to hide personal information
Although it is a personal choice to keep some personal information public, it is still advisable to hide as much as possible.
Facebook provides control for each type of personal information and it is possible to make sure that it is not visible to everyone but only to friends or even close friends.
To create friend lists, just open this special page and start tidying up.
To hide other personal information on Facebook, you need to open your profile and press the Information button.
Leaving aside the overview, it is better to click one by one each row in the list on the left to change the privacy level of the various information.
By moving the mouse over each item, you can press the button that changes the level of privacy and the information itself.
After each change, you must press the Save button to make it effective.
Keep in mind that the world symbol means public while the icon with the facets means visible to friends.
It is also possible to completely hide special information such as the phone number, so that it is visible only to me and nobody else.
2) Hide other people's posts on our profile
If not configured, it is possible for all friends to write on our Facebook profile, which is a really annoying thing because it creates disorder and because it forces us to read and give feedback on something that is not said may interest us.
To avoid having your journal filled by external interventions, you can do two things:
- Completely prevent others from writing on our profile
- Limit the visibility of others' posts by hiding them from everyone except us.
These options are controlled from the Facebook Settings, going to Diary and adding tags .
The first two options, those of the Diary section, allow you to decide:
- Who can write in your diary? : where Only Me can be placed (this will prevent friends from giving us birthday greetings visibly on the profile)
- Who can see what others are publishing in your journal? : you can put only me to hide all posts written by others on our profile.
3) Change the visibility of all posts already published
Facebook allows you to change in a single solution, the visibility of all posts already written, so that if they were visible to everyone, they will become visible instead only to friends. This is also the quickest way to remove old Facebook posts that you would not like to be more searchable by strangers (even if you have to check that friends are trusted)
To do this, go to Settings -> Privacy and on the right click on the option
Do you want to limit the audience of the posts you have shared with friends of friends or with everyone? and press the Limit past posts button.
4) Use acquaintances list
This is a function that few people still use, but that becomes the most important when it comes to Facebook privacy management.
Putting some friends on the list of acquaintances is a way to hide posts from certain people leaving them visible only to main friends.
In this way you can limit the audience of your interventions, without removing any friendship.
Adding to the Facebook acquaintances list can be done by pressing the Friends button in each person's profile.
5) Control of people who can look for us and contact us
Facebook gives you the opportunity to hide and prevent other people from finding our profile and contacting us to ask for friendship.
Above all, those who receive too many requests and those who do not want to be found by old schoolmates, instead of using a fake name that cannot be done, can use this option to hide from the Facebook search engine, from Google and from all over.
These options are in Settings> Privacy, in the section:
How people find you and contact you
From here you can decide who can send us friend requests, who can see our friends list, who can find us from our email address, who can find us by phone number and who can find us on Google.
6) Check the photos and facial recognition
Managing tag options means controlling who can publish photos with our name.
We have seen in another updated article what it means to be tagged in photos on Facebook and how facial recognition works.
Photo tags can be locked in the diary and tag settings where it is always advisable to activate the option to check the tags in the photos before they are published in our profile.
As for facial recognition, this is automatic on Facebook and allows you to suggest the tags in the photos in which our face appears.
However, this can be deactivated from Settings> Face recognition .
If people who post random articles on your history annoy you, you can change the privacy setting of the Facebook timeline. With the help of this setting, you basically close the doors of your history for everyone. It means that none of your friends list will be able to post on your history.
7) Remove access to third party apps
This is the part of privacy settings that has been most updated by Facebook following the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Going to Settings> Apps and websites you can check the applications that can read our data and block them if they are not recognized or if they are never used. Note that the apps have been divided into active, expired and removed. Expired ones are applications authorized in the past, which will now require a new authorization to access. From the App, websites and games box, you can press the Edit button to completely disable the platform related to external apps.
As you will notice, the App used by others setting has been removed, which was the one that allowed Cambridge Analytica to steal information from millions of people, even if its app had only been used by a few thousand.
More information on this section is in the guide on how to prevent Facebook from transferring data to external companies and applications.
8) The Facebook Basic Privacy Information page describes, divided by sections and with the help of graphics, all the options that you can modify to protect the profile from outsiders and decide who can see what. The instructions in the guide are written with the aim of making them understand even the least tech savvy, highlighting many tools to protect privacy, dividing the into four distinct categories, with subsections. You can therefore learn all about the management of privacy, account security, the advertising that appears on Facebook and the latest Facebook news.
The most important part is that of privacy control, which is located at the bottom of the privacy management instructions page. You are then guided through a procedure to check the current settings so that you can change them immediately if you notice something strange or not liked. You can therefore control who sees my posts, who sees the activities of the applications and who sees details of my profile.
Under the security section, you can check the security of the account which is even more important, because it allows you to change your password, to activate access control and to disconnect old logins made from PC or cell phones that are no longer used.
In the advertising section you can ask not to appear in the advertisements and advertisements.
In the settings it is also possible to clear Facebook activity history and block data collection from external sites, as explained in another post.
Finally, I refer to the guide to hide Facebook profile and make yourself invisible for those who really want to remain private.
I close by saying that my profile, which practically speaks only of technology, is completely public so if you read me, you are also my friends so if you like, add me in the contacts or, better yet, become a Fan of Pom-HeyWEB !.
