The world's biggest social media platform is Facebook. It is convenient to link up with friends or colleagues, but it also holds a lot of your personal data. A lot of personal data may be on public display if you don't have the right privacy settings.
There are ways to prevent other Facebook users from seeing your information if you want them to.
If you want to make yourself private on Facebook, here is how.
How to make your Facebook private
You can set your account and posts to four levels of privacy on Facebook.
Public means that anyone with a link can see it, even if they don't have a Facebook account.
Friends means that the only people who can see it are people on your friends list. You can sometimes exclude certain friends from seeing a post, too.
Friends of friends means that anyone who you share a mutual friend with can see it.
Only me means that it's totally private, and you're the only one who can see it.
If you want to make your Facebook private, you will want to choose Only me whenever you can.
You will need to open the Facebook website on a computer to find all of the privacy tools that are available in the mobile app.
To get to the Privacy menu on Facebook.
1. If you haven't already, open the Facebook website and log into your account.
2. Click the arrow in the top-right corner to go to settings.
Head to your Privacy menu. Facebook; William Antonelli/Insider
3. Privacy is found in the left sidebar of the settings page.
This will open the Privacy settings page. You have a lot of options here.
Make your posts private
You can change who is allowed to see your posts, posts you have been tagged in, and pages that you follow by going to the Your Activity section.
Click Who can see your future posts? to change the privacy settings for everything you post from now on.
Click Who can see the people, Pages and lists you follow? to change who's allowed to see what you're following.
Clicking either Review all your posts and things you're tagged in or Limit the audience for posts you've shared with friends of friends or Public? will take you to a new page where you can edit the privacy settings on things you've already uploaded.
You'll find all these options on the Privacy page. Facebook; William Antonelli/Insider
Hide your profile so people can't find you
The How People Find and Contact You tools can help keep you out of the public eye.
Click Who can send you friend requests to limit the amount of people allowed to friend you. Just note that you can't turn friend requests off completely — the best you can do is limit them to mutual friends.
The Who can see your friends list? option can hide your friends list, so people can't see who's in your network.
Both the Who can look you up using the email address you provided? and Who can look you up using the phone number you provided? questions can make it so even if someone already has your contact information, they won't be able to find you on Facebook.
Clicking Do you want search engines outside of Facebook to link to your profile? lets you hide your profile from Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines. This is useful if you're worried about people finding you by googling your name — just note that it can take a few days to process.
Stop people from messaging you
You can limit who can message you using the How You Get Message Requests section. You can choose to receive certain messages but keep them away from your inbox.
Under Potential Connections, choose where messages from people who have your phone number and/or mutual friends go. You can choose Chats (your regular inbox), Message requests (a separate folder), or Don't receive requests (deletes them).
Under Other people, make the same choice for people you're not connected to and Instagram users. Here, you can't choose to receive their messages in your regular inbox — you have to choose either Message requests or Don't receive requests.
How to make specific Facebook posts private
The controls above control your account. You can give the post its own privacy options when you post something. You can keep your profile private but also make a single public post.
1. Click the little box under your name to make a Facebook post.
Tap the audience box to choose how private the post is. Facebook; William Antonelli/Insider
2. In the new menu, choose how private or public you want the post to be.
Only the audience you chose will be able to see it.
The previous version of this article was contributed by Jen.
Editor & Staff Writer for Tech Reference William Antonelli is a writer, editor, and organizer based in New York City. As a founding member of the Reference team, he's helped grow Tech Reference from humble beginnings into a juggernaut that attracts over 20 million visits a month.Outside of Insider, his writing has appeared in publications like Polygon, The Outline, Kotaku, and more. He's also a go-to source for tech analysis on channels like Newsy, Cheddar, and NewsNation.You can find him on Twitter @DubsRewatcher, or reach him by email at wantonelli@insider.com.
