Facebook is a great platform to stay in touch with friends and family. It also helps you reconnect with people you have lost contact with. Occasionally you may also want to make new friends through Facebook. However, it is a wise decision to not let strangers have access to your data which may be a possibility due to incorrect privacy settings. You can easily prevent your data from public display by learning how to make Facebook completely private to non-friends.
Read more: How Can You See If Someone Is Not Following You on Facebook? A Simple Guide
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How to make Facebook completely private to non-friends?
Facebook app do not offer all the privacy tools at your disposal. Thus, if you want to access all the available privacy tools of Facebook, you would need to get on to the desktop version of the platform. Here is the step-by-step guide to finding and accessing all privacy settings:
- Go to the Facebook website from your browser
- Log in to your account
- Click on your profile picture at the top right corner
- Choose ‘Settings & privacy’ from the menu
- Click on ‘Settings’ from the submenu
- Click on ‘Privacy’ in the left sidebar
You will find the ‘Privacy Settings and Tools’ page opening with several options. Decide what you want to do accordingly.
Make posts private
Visit the ‘Your Activity’ section and make the necessary changes.
- Click on ‘Who can see your future posts?’ and choose your preferred option
- Click on ‘Who can see the people, Pages, and lists you follow?’ to change the settings
- Edit the privacy settings of ‘Review all your posts and things you’re tagged in’ and ‘Limit the audience for posts you’ve shared with friends of friends or Public?’ sections
Keep your profile hidden
Click on the ‘Who can send you friend requests’ option and change the settings so that only mutual friends can add you as a friend. You can hide your friend list by changing the settings available on the ‘Who can see your friends list?’ page.
Make the necessary changes to the ‘Who can look you up using the email address you provided?’ and ‘Who can look you up using the phone number you provided?’ pages so that even people with your contact information cannot find you on this social media platform.
Hide your profile from Yahoo, Google, Bing and other search engines by changing settings on the ‘Do you want search engines outside of Facebook to link to your profile?’ page. By doing this, nobody can find you even if they try to look you up with your name on the search engines.
Set up privacy check reminders
If and when your privacy needs change, you may want to update the Facebook settings. Thus, to keep yourself reminded:
- Go to the Facebook website from your browser
- Log in to your account
- Click on your profile picture at the top right corner
- Choose ‘Settings & privacy’ from the menu
- Select ‘Privacy Checkup’ from the submenu
- Click on the ellipsis menu
- Select the ‘Set up reminders’ option
- Choose when you wish for Facebook to remind you of a privacy check
- Hit the ‘Save’ option to lock your decision
Suggested read: How To Improve Privacy By Hiding Your Photos From Strangers On Facebook
You can easily build up a fortress around now that you know how to make Facebook completely private to non-friends. Let us know in the comments section below if you want to learn how to have strong privacy settings around Facebook Messenger as well. Share this article with others if you found it useful.
