Five privacy tips to keep in mind to stay safe on Facebook

Facebook is almost 18 years old, and while it may be too boring for Generation Z, the social network still has nearly 3 billion monthly active users. With such a large user base and the fact that Facebook is notorious for its privacy issues, it’s important to act diligently to keep your data, like your photos and contact information, safe and secure. Fortunately, Facebook has many built-in tools to help you do this. You can limit who sees your posts on the platform and much more. We have listed these measures below.

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Limit who can see your posts

Facebook offers several ways to keep some or all of your posts private. To change who can see your posts, just tap the text field on your Facebook home page that allows you to create a new post. There under your name you will see a menu which is usually “Friends”. Tapping on it will allow you to change the audience of the post to something else. For example, anyone on or off Facebook can see a ‘Public’ post.

You can also use the feature to show your post to certain people or hide it from certain people. But if you want even more granular control, then ‘Custom’ will suffice.

lock your profile

Locking your profile restricts your profile photo and cover photo from being accessible to strangers

By default, your Facebook profile and much of your information is visible and accessible to stalkers. To change that, you’ll want to lock your profile. You can lock your profile by first opening it on your phone, tapping on the three-dot menu on the left, and then selecting ‘Lock Profile’.

Doing so will limit the visibility of all your profile content to your friends only. It will also restrict strangers from accessing your profile photo and cover photo. What this means is that those unknown users will no longer be able to see your full profile size and cover photos when they tap on it.

Limit who can send you friend requests

You can block strangers from sending you friend requests on Facebook

If you get a lot of friend requests from strangers to the point that it becomes annoying, you can block strangers from sending them to you. This can be done by first heading to the three-bar menu on the far right of the Facebook app navigation, then expanding the Settings & Privacy menu.

Then, tap Settings, scroll down to Audience & Visibility, and select “How people find and contact you.” Here you can choose to receive friend requests from everyone or friend requests from friends of friends.

Check where you’re logged in

Signed in on a borrowed device and forgot to sign out? Do you suspect that someone is sneaking into your account? The first thing you’ll want to do in either case is change your password. But if you want to determine where you’re logged in or who’s been accessing your account, then Facebook offers a feature to help you do that.

Open Facebook settings, head to password & security, and you’ll find a list showing all the devices you’re logged in to and their location. You can proceed to remove the suspects from the list.

Block apps from accessing your Facebook data

If you’ve ever used Facebook as a login method for an app, game, or website, you’ve probably been asked to grant access to some of your information from your account. While Facebook does expire those permissions on its own after 90 days of inactivity, you can block access before then. Please note that the following steps can only be done via the FB desktop site.

1. Click your profile photo in the top right of Facebook
2. Select Settings & Privacy, then Settings
3. Click Privacy in the left menu, then select Blocking
4. Click Edit in the section Block apps
5. Here you can add apps and games to a block list