How to control your privacy on Facebook

Facebook’s privacy settings are huge and can be difficult to use. Here’s a guideline to some of the most important Facebook’s privacy controls. 

Protect your most sensible info

Do you really want to provide your employment info, name all your relatives or share your religious, political views? Take into account all the risks before providing people access to such information as your birth date, relationship status, family info, address, employment.

Frequently verify your visibility

If you’ve never changed Facebook’s privacy settings, you are sharing more than you think. See how your Facebook page looks to public, if necessary, review specific account settings.

Understand what you cannot secure

Your Facebook name and the main photo in your profile continue to be available to all people on the Web. You can use an image of somebody other than you or even some object as your profile photo.

Restrict your status updates exposure

By default status updates are set to Public. To safeguard personal or sensitive information you can restrict the audience for every status update on the go, while posting, but it is time consuming. It’s undoubtedly more convenient and reliable; to adjust the audience for all updates at once to just Close Friends or whatever you decide.

Deactivate automatic face recognition

You should know that Facebook recognizes your face in most photos other people upload. If you want to turn this feature off, go to Privacy Settings and for Who sees tag suggestions when photos that look like you are uploaded?, select your Friends.

 

Block websites and apps

Should you not interfere, friends may share sensitive information about you with apps. To stop this sharing, just turn off all apps or limit info you share with apps. Go to Privacy Settings and click on  How people bring your info to apps they use, click on Edit Settings.

Deactivating or deleting Facebook account

Finally, you can deactivate or completely delete your account. With deactivation all your data will be kept until you decide to activate your account again.  If you decide to delete your account, all info will disappear forever. Deletion process can last for about a month and requires disabling Facebook log-ins at other websites and not using Like button.