It is time for the holidays. That means there will be lots of treasured memories and pictures that you will want to share with your family and friends.
A lot of people do this through social media, particularly Facebook. It is one of the easiest ways to make sure everyone gets to see it. The key is making sure not everyone can see all of your pictures. Especially if they are pictures of small children (i.e. grandkids, nieces, nephews).
There are steps you can take on Facebook to protect your privacy. The first thing to do is to adjust your privacy settings. To do this, go to the blue bar at the top of your Facebook page. In the right-hand corner, you will see this series of icons. You will want to click on the downward pointing triangle.
This menu will open when you click the triangle. Go to Settings.
There are a lot of options available in settings. We are going to focus on the Privacy and Timeline and Tagging sections, as they pertain to the content seen and posted on your profile. A few quick tweaks can make a big difference.
First stop: privacy settings. These settings relate a lot to visibility, both of your posts and of your profile.
You can control who:
- Sees your posts
- What posts you have been tagged in
- Sees the posts you share
- Can send you friend requests
- Has access your friends list
- Can look you up by email/phone number
- And if people can find your Facebook page when searching your name on Google or other search engines.
Privacy
You can choose this information to be shared with anyone on or off of Facebook, only your friends and their friends, your friends, or all of your friends except a certain group.
Depending on what kind of information you tend to share, it can be better to keep it to friends. You can also adjust this on a post by post basis.
When you are writing a post, you will se this little blue button that says ‘Friends’ (or whatever you have the privacy set to). If you click the arrow, you will get a drop down menu. You can choose to exclude certain people from seeing the post, only share with certain people, or even make it so you are the only one who can see it.
It is completely up to you!
Next stop: Face Recognition. Before you start to panic, this is mostly used for photo tagging. Have you ever been looking at a picture on Facebook and it suggests that you tag someone in the photo? That is what this is. You can keep it on or turn it off.
Now for the blocking. You have a few options here. Note: anyone that is placed on any of these lists will not be notified of this.
Blocking
By adding a person to your Restricted List, you limit what they can see. They can’t see the posts you share to only Friends. They might see anything your share publicly or on a mutual friend’s timeline, or anything they are tagged in. If there is anyone who is constantly commenting on your posts that you wish would leave you alone, but you don’t want to block them, put them here.
Blocking is the next step up. When you chose to block a user, it will make it like they never existed. They can’t see anything of yours, you can’t see anything of theirs. Photos, comments, posts, anything.
A step down from this is blocking messages. They can still post to your timeline, comment on your posts, tag you, all that jazz, but they cannot contact you through messenger.
You can also prevent friends from sending you invites to play games and to attend events. Enter their name and you will no longer get invites from them.
You also have the ability to block any and all Facebook apps from contacting you or gathering any nonpublic information from you. You can block them by entering their name in the ‘Block Apps’ section. This applies to Facebook pages as well. This will prevent any interactions between you and the page. It also will unlike and follow the page, if you were still following them.
Timeline & Tagging
You can also control what goes on with your personal profile. Select who can post on your timeline, who can see what others post, who can see the posts you are tagged in, and opt to be able to review those posts before they appear on your timeline. That goes for tags that people add to your posts as well.
By adjusting these settings you can rest assured that your information will be safe and you will be in control of everything that goes on with your profile.
So stop worrying and start sharing all of those wonderful holiday memories.
