Facebook Privacy Settings and Shortcuts you Must Use

While enjoying the Facebook with our family and friends, we often forget the privacy concerns associated with the shared stuff.  The stuff we shared represents a lot about us and is always vulnerable over the Internet, be it a personal photograph or our personal details.  And since Facebook is becoming more public every other day, keeping our info on Facebook is getting harder. Facebook is continuously improving the privacy features which are capable of making your presence on Facebook almost anonymous, but most of us don’t know much about these features.

So, we’ve created this comprehensive up-to-date guide which would definitely make your presence more secure on Facebook.  This guide will significantly strengthen the privacy of content-sharing and would ensure that your Facebook stuff is shared only among the trusted people.

• Also See:Best Facebook Tips/Tricks 2013.

1.Hiding Contact Info:

Sharing your contact info with unknowns can put you in trouble. Contact info is specified by user himself and basically it includes your email, your address, contact number, etc. If you’ve specified contact info on your timeline, you can control its privacy.

For hiding your contact info, go to your timeline and look for “About me” option under your profile picture. In next page, look for “Contact info” column and click “edit”.  A pop up containing all your contact info will be opened and at the end of each detail you’ll find a drop down list denoted by icon as circled above in the picture.  From there you can specify to whom with you want to share this info, three options are available- Public, friends, none. Once done, press the “save” button at the end of the popped window.

2.Timeline and Tagging

Guidelines below will help you to manage your timeline and tagging feature of Facebook.

Tagging

Tagging is one of the most intelligent features of Facebook and one of the most annoying too. Why annoying? It is annoying because sometimes your friends tag you in a picture which you don’t want to share with your friends and sometime they tag you in a picture which is not concerned to you in any way. So to control that Facebook has a privacy option Timeline review which let you to review the Tagged posts before posting it on your Wall.

For enabling Timeline review privacy option, Go to Account settings> Timeline and Tagging. There you’ll find an option- “How can I manage tags people add and tagging suggestions?” Enable the review option from there as shown in the picture above.

Timeline

Further, you can also make your timeline more private. There are privacy options that allow you to hide your timeline’s posts from anyone and moreover you can also control the “Right to post on your wall”.  For enabling these privacy features, Go to Account settings> Timeline and Tagging and change the settings according to your need. (See pic above)

3.Message Filtering 

Sometimes you receive unexpected messages from unknowns. These unknown messages messed up your inbox and for keeping these unexpected messages away, Facebook recently added Message Filtering option.  If you will enable this option, all messages from unknowns were dropped in “others” box.

For enabling this option Go to Messages>Others>Edit Preferences. A pop up will be opened and choose the one from given options- either basic or strict. Basic filtering will work as usual whereas strict filtering will keep away unknown messages from your Inbox.

4.Who can search you and see your stuff?

Your Facebook stuff including timeline is public by default. But Facebook provides you some powerful privacy settings with which you can hide yourself completely on Facebook. For managing privacy settings, Go to Privacy Settings and Tools.  In that section, you’ll find two privacy settings:

Who can see my stuff?

• Using this option, you can manage privacy settings like- Who can see your future posts? You can set it to public, friends, only you or even to custom.

• You can even review all your posts and things you're tagged in using Activity Log. Activity log contains the record of your every action on Facebook like pages you liked, posts you were tagged in, your comments, etc. This way you can also control the sharing of your activity.

• Further, you can even limit the audience for posts. You can decide whether you want to share past posts with friends of friends or Public?

Who can look me up?

• You can decide that who can look you up using email or contact number. For enabling this, Go to Privacy Settings and Tools and under “who can look me up” change the privacy settings according to your needs.

• Apart from this, you can even disable the Indexing of your profile by search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. For disabling indexing, Go to Privacy Settings and Tools and under “who can look me up” turn the indexing option off. .

5.Facebook Account Security

It’s possible that right now someone is trying hard to break into your account. However, hacking a Facebook account is almost impossible but your negligence like poor password, etc. can make it possible. Here are few suggestions that will definitely make your account much safer than ever.

Strong Password

Applying a weak password just only because you don’t want to forget it- is the dumbest excuse. If you’re not using a password that isn’t 8-10 character long, doesn’t include both uppercase and lower case letters and don’t include a numeric character then believe us your account is more vulnerable to hacking.

Enable Secure browsing

You can use your Facebook in “https” mode which will encrypt all your Facebook activity between Facebook Server and your computer. For enabling secure browsing, Go to Account Settings> Security and enable the secure browsing from there.

Enabling Login Notification

Enabling Login Notifications will inform you whenever your account is accessed from unknown or unrecognized device or location either via email or by SMS. For enabling login notifications, Go to Account Settings> Security and enable the secure browsing from there.

• Must Check:How to Protect Your Facebook Account.

6.Blocking

If someone is annoying you or there’s someone from whom you want to hide on Facebook, you can block him/her. Once you blocked someone, he/she won’t be able to contact you on Facebook; in fact he/she won’t be able to even find you on Facebook.  For blocking someone, Go to the profile of that person and click the settings icon just after the message button (Pic above). Choose the block option and confirm the blocking.

• And if ever you think of unblocking someone, go to Account settings>Blocking and unblock him/her from there (Pic Above).

7.Privacy Shortcuts

Recently Facebook introduced the Privacy shortcut feature on the Facebook which is indeed a great addition to the Facebook. You can quickly configure the Messaging filters, quickly block someone and configure the privacy of your posts right from the news feed page.

8.Applying Privacy to Media files and posts

For configuring privacy of a status before posting, click the Public button just before Post button and from there you can specify the privacy of that post (Pic above).

For configuring privacy of a picture, open the picture, click the list menu button and from there you can specify the privacy of that picture (Pic above).

For configuring privacy of an album, Go to Photos> Albums, under the album name, click the list menu button and specify the privacy of that album from the list (Pic above).
Well, that’s all for now, we’ll keep you updated whenever Facebook adds new privacy features.  Anyhow, if we have missed any of privacy settings, do let us know through comment section below.