How can i hide my personal information on facebook

How To Hide Your Personal Information On Facebook

By Tina Sieber

Published Oct 11, 2012

In the age of the Internet, privacy is a luxury and you have to constantly be on your heels to maintain it. Facebook makes it particularly hard for users to guard their personal data. Despite many changes, Facebook privacy settings remain complicated. Moreover, past updates have unexpectedly made previously private information available to the public. Well, no stranger needs to know your email address, phone number, or see your family pictures.

Well, no stranger needs to know your email address, phone number, or see your family pictures. In this article I show how you can check what the public can see of you on Facebook. I also explain how you can control which of your information is visible.

Do you think your profile is all locked up and the public cannot see anything they shouldn't? Well, how about we check it out, just to be sure!

Go to your Facebook Timeline, i.e. the page that is shown when you click your own name on Facebook. While you are logged in, you will of course see everything. In the top right of your profile summary that heads the Timeline, you should see a Settings icon next to the Activity Log button. Click Settings and select View As...

This reveals what your Facebook Timeline looks like to a complete stranger. You can also test the view for specific people, by entering their names in the respective field in the top left.

The Timeline is one thing, but what you should really check is your About page. So while viewing your Timeline from the public's perspective, click About in the bottom left of the header. This is where Facebook potentially reveals your contact information, your employer, your education, where you live etc.

Something else you should check is what other parts of your Facebook profile are available to strangers by clicking the About button in the top left. This could include your friends list, your photos, your likes, subscriptions, events you are attending, your notes, and music.

So did you spot anything you didn't want the public to see?

How Can I Remove Items From Public View?

For most content, Facebook makes privacy control fairly easy.

Let's start with your About page. Return to this page in your normal logged in view. Notice there is an Edit button in the top right of every box. An exception is your history because it only aggregates available information. Click Edit for an item you want to change, then click the little symbols next to each entry to control who can see this information. You can choose from a few default options, including Friends or Only Me . You can also make the information available to custom lists of friends. Don't forget to hit Save every time you change a setting.

Curious about how to create custom lists of friends? Find out how you can use Facebook Friends Lists For Interests Or Circles.

Next, we will look at Photos. You can control the privacy for each photo individually. This is good to know because you cannot control the privacy level for the Profile Pictures album. To change its visibility, open a photo and click the Edit button on the right. Now you can change the description, location, date, and select who can see the photo. Click the Done Editing button to save your changes.

Fortunately, you can easily change the visibility of your custom photo albums. You will find the menu icon to change who can see an album, next to the number of photos in the respective album.

If you do not want others to see photos you were tagged in, review the 3 Things You Need To Know About Photo Tagging In Facebook to find out how to control tags.

Finally, to control what else people can see of you, including photos you were tagged in, let's look at your overall Privacy Settings. In the top right of your profile, click the little arrow and select Privacy Settings. This page allows you to customize privacy settings ranging from who can find and contact you on Facebook (How You Connect) and who can see posts you have been tagged in to social ads.

More Resources to Protect Your Facebook Privacy

One article cannot cover everything. If you have a feeling that there is a lot more you need to learn about guarding your Facebook privacy, you are probably right. Here is some material that will help you along the way:

ROUNDUP: 5 Must-Know Critical Facebook Privacy Tips
The Top 5 Privacy Tips For Facebook Timeline Applications
How To Control Your Privacy With The Facebook Timeline

What are some of your biggest privacy concerns with Facebook? Is there any personal information you wish you could control that wasn't mentioned above?

How to Hide Myself From Users on Facebook | Small Business

By Jason Spidle

Facebook provides a full range of privacy tools that enable you to control who can see your profile, pictures and status updates. With these privacy tools, you can completely hide your profile from other users on Facebook. Depending on your needs, you can either hide your profile from specific users or you can configure your profile to be invisible to everyone except friends or friends of friends. On the other hand, if you only want to hide your profile when you are signed out, you can do so by deactivating your account.

Hide From Specific Users

Navigate to Facebook and sign in to your account.
Click the arrow to the right of the "Home" menu and select "Privacy Settings" from the drop-down menu.
Scroll to the bottom of the page and click "Manage Blocking" in the Blocked People and Apps section.
Type the name or email of the user you want to hide your profile from in the "Block Users" section and then click "Block." If you are blocking a user by name, you may be presented with a list of users with that name from which you will need to press the "Block" button beside the specific user you want to block.

Hide From Public Searches

Navigate to Facebook and sign in to your account.
Click the arrow next to the "Home" menu and select "Privacy Settings" from the drop-down menu.
Click "Edit Settings" in the "How You Connect" section.
Click the "Who can look up your profile by name or contact info?" drop-down menu and select "Friends of Friends" or "Friends" to limit the people who can view your Facebook profile. This hides your profile from being visible in public searches on Facebook or from search engines like Google.
Click "Done" to save your settings.

Hide When Signed Out

Navigate to Facebook and sign in to your account.
Click the arrow to the right of the "Home" menu and select "Account Settings" from the drop-down menu.
Select the "Security" tab and then click "Deactivate Your Account."
Select "This is temporary, I'll be back" and then click "Confirm. "
Enter your Facebook password and then click "Deactivate Now." You will be signed out of Facebook and your profile is hidden from everyone on Facebook. Reactivate your account by signing in as usual from the Facebook home page.

References

Facebook Help Center: Blocking People
Facebook Help Center: Privacy: Search Privacy Settings and the Suggestions Feature
Facebook Help Center: How Do I Deactivate My Account?
Facebook Help Center: I Deactivated My Account. How Do I Reactivate It?

Writer Bio

Jason Spidle is a technology enthusiast and writer. His writing on computers, smartphones, Web design, Internet applications, sports and music has been published at a variety of websites including Salon, JunkMedia, Killed in Cars and The Columbia Free Times. Spidle maintains a number of blogs featuring poetry, short stories and other fiction.

How to hide all information about yourself from Facebook in a few minutes – AIN.

March 18, 2015, 15:00

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Social networks know much more about the habits and lives of their users than their parents or even spouses. This is not a very pleasant fact, because all this information is available not only to advertisers, but also to your competitors and enemies. In the lives of many people, there are situations when it is necessary for some time to disappear from the public space and go into the shadows. Facebook does not have a built-in ability to delete all your posts and photos, but you can hide them from prying eyes for a while. Business Insider journalists described a sequence of actions, as a result of which you can hide Facebook information, and the user's previous activity will be hidden. nine0003

In 2021, the editors of AIN.UA updated this text. 6 years after its publication, Facebook has simplified the procedure for hiding all information about yourself from Facebook and switching to "invisible mode". In addition, there was also a function to delete posts for a certain period. In the updated material, we tell you how to do it.

How to hide Facebook information

Open your personal Facebook profile and open the drop-down list in the upper right corner of the screen. Select "Settings and Privacy", and then go to the "Quick Privacy Settings" menu. nine0016

Images in the material: Tatyana Gritsyk, AIN.UA

In the "Quick Privacy Settings" menu, look at the "Privacy" list and click "Advanced Privacy Settings".

Find "Who can see your Future Posts?", click "Edit" and select "Only Me".

The next step is to hide previous posts. To do this, click on the link "Restrict access to old publications" and confirm the action. Thus, all our previous entries will become visible only to friends. nine0016

Repeat the step "Who can see the people, Pages, and lists you follow?". Next, limit the list of people who can find you and contact you. Be sure to turn off the ability to find us by email address and phone number.

Another important thing is that search engines should not know about us, so we uncheck the box "Allow search engines outside of Facebook to show your profile in search results." nine0016

If you want to limit new correspondence requests, in the "How requests for correspondence" menu, click "Edit" and select "Do not receive requests" for each option.

Then go to the "Profile and Tags" menu and restrict the ability of other people to post on your profile. For each of the items, indicate "Only me", and also prohibit others from sharing your publications in their stories. Repeat the steps on the Tags tab. If you want to check the posts you're tagged in before those posts are shown on your profile, set the appropriate settings on the "Verification" tab. nine0016

Next, go to the Public Posts menu. Prevent outsiders from subscribing to your updates, commenting on publications, and leaving "Like" marks. Turn off the Off-Facebook Preview option.

After that, we prohibit Facebook and third-party sites from using the data from your profile. To do this, go to the relevant menus on the link and click on "Your data settings on Facebook". Here, remove all integrations with third-party sites and various kinds of applications. nine0016

In the "Your advertising preferences" tab, prevent other users from seeing information about your social interactions with ads by selecting "Only me".

Bulk delete Facebook posts

Open your personal Facebook page.
Go to your feed and click Manage.

Click select all.

Click next.
Select "Remove Posts"/If you want to hide posted posts, check "Hide Posts". nine0016

Recall that recently Facebook has seriously taken care of the problem of cheating likes on brand pages and announced changes to their counting system. Soon the social network will remove "likes" from users whose accounts have been deactivated. This applies to deceased users and to those whose profiles have been deleted for violating the terms of use of the social network or due to prolonged inactivity.

nine0002 Remember me

By clicking "Login/Register" you agree to the terms "User Agreement" AIN.UA

Forgot your password? nine0003

Password recovery

Please enter your e-mail. You will receive an email with a link to create a new password.

Back

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How to hide information on Facebook from strangers / AdMe

You can learn a lot about a person from a Facebook profile. Not everyone wants to show their personal life to their bosses, parents, their exes or just strangers. Social network settings are called confusing and complicated, and deleting your page is almost impossible: your information will be stored on special servers. But still, if you dig deep into the Facebook menu, you can increase the level of privacy. nine0003

ADME shares with readers an instruction that will allow you to protect your page from unwanted guests and "detectives" with bad intentions.

How other users see your page

Go to your page. On the right you will see the line "View Activity Log".
Click on the button with three dots and select the line "View as ...".
You will find out how your profile is seen by Facebook users who are not your friends. nine0016
At the top of the page, click on the line "View as a specific person" and enter the name of the acquaintance you need in the window that opens.
You can check how different people see your page when you change the settings described below.

Who sees your posts

Click the question mark circle at the top of the page.
Click on the "Check Privacy" line. Here Facebook will offer you to edit the degree of your openness. nine0016
You can open your posts to everyone, friends only, some friends, or make yourself the only reader of your private posts. Don't forget to click on the word "More" to select the option you want.

Then you can change these settings for each new post. When you want to write something on the wall, click on the button shown in the picture above and select the user category. These settings are saved for your next posts. You can also change the visibility of already written publications, hide and open them. nine0016

Who sees the apps you use

Next, edit the visibility of the apps you signed up for or logged into through Facebook. You can immediately select the “Only me” option everywhere.

Who can see your profile

Now set your privacy. You do not have to delete your number or mail from the page, just choose who will have access to the data - everyone, friends, only you, or also friends of friends. nine0016

Who sees your content

Click the circle with the question mark again.
Select the line "Quick privacy settings".
Then click on the bar that says "Who can see my content?". Here you can again select a category of users and change these settings with each new post.

Who sees the content you're tagged in

In the same menu, you will see the question "Where can I see who can see my posts or content with my tags?". Click on the Activity Log link below this question. You will be on the page of your Activity Log.

In the menu on the left, click on "Chronicle Overview".
Now click on the gear icon on the right, next to the "Notifications" button.
You will see the Check Chronicle window. On the right, select the "Enabled" mode. Now you will see all the posts where you are tagged and choose whether they will be in your Timeline or not. Please note that if you do not approve them for your Timeline, they will be visible to other Facebook users. If your friends posted your bad photo, you can ask them to remove it. nine0016

Who sees your likes

Select More on your page and click on Likes.
Just below, find the pencil icon, click on it and select "Edit the privacy of your marks." Here you can choose who will see your likes depending on the subject of the post: movies, music, and others.

Who sees your friends list and subscriptions

Go back to your page and go to the "Friends" section.
A little lower, on the right, find the pencil icon and click on it.
The line "Edit privacy settings" will appear - we need it. In the window that appears, you can choose who sees your friends and subscriptions. Remember that your friends will always have access to information about mutual friends, and the people you follow will also see it. nine0016

Blacklist

If you want to completely block the annoying person, click the question mark circle at the top of the page again.
Learn more