Recently, Facebook was announced the most visited sites on the web by Google ad planner. Google showed the stats of most visited top 1000 sites in which Facebook holds the 1st place. I think this stats will go higher as few days back Facebook rolled out simpler privacy settings which was their biggest concern from last one or two months.
Even we wrote an article some time before to check and fix your Facebook privacy settings in just a matter of a click.
Earlier Facebook privacy controls was much more complex to understand and fix but according to some Facebook users, new settings provides easy and great control over privacy issues.
So, in this article, I am explaining how to adjust your new settings to gain full advantage and increase your privacy on Facebook. I think this is really essential to take important steps which I am going to mentioned below to adjust your settings and keep away from ever-increasing privacy scams.
Log in to your Facebook account and select “Privacy Settings“ from the “Account” pull down menu in the top right corner. If you see “Choose Your Privacy Settings” on top of the page, it means you got the new privacy settings. If you haven’t got yet, don’t be panic as Facebook is rolling out these changes gradually and will reach you in some days.
After reaching the page, let’s see how we can change the settings to get the most benefit out of new Facebook privacy settings.
1) You can block all applications, games, websites etc. : Facebook rolled a button which will help you to opt out from the entire Facebook platform. It means you can block all applications, websites, games etc. in a single click and free yourself from annoying apps requests, free your wall from apps spam. You can also check this article to hide unwanted notifications and applications through a simple Firefox extension.
You can click on this link to open settings to opt out from Facebook platform or click on “edit your settings” in “Applications and Websites” option on the left bottom corner of the privacy settings page.
After reaching the “Applications, Games and Websites” page, you can choose to disable all apps, games, etc. or you can manually select one by one.
2) Hide your friend list from showing to the world : I think this is must be needed control which Facebook users always wanted. Now you can hide your friends list from the world. It means apps and other third-party developers will not be able to know about your friends. You can also make all friends private so even google search will also not show who your friends are.
Click on this link to go directly to the page where you can change friend list settings or click on “view settings” in “Basic Directory Information” option on top of the privacy settings page.
After reaching to the “basic directory information” page, edit settings in front of “See my friends lists” option.
3) Hide your interests from rest of the world : There is a system called “Connections” which means your Facebook’s interests. These are the same interests which Facebook made public when they rolled out community pages in April. But now you can make it private to show them only to your friends, friends of friends or with no-one.
Click on this link and edit settings in front of “See my interests and other pages” option in bottom of the page.
4) Make your Default Public Information private : There is still lot of your information which appears to be public by default when you register for the Facebook account. Anyways, you can now easily customize your private settings and make your default public information more private.
There are 4 default privacy options you can choose from : Make all your information appears to everyone or to friends of friends or only friends. There is also one Recommended option which is Facebook’s recommended privacy settings. You can easily select any of the default privacy settings by clicking on “Apply These Settings” or customize according to your need by clicking on “Customize settings” just opposite of “Apply These Settings”.
5) Hide your information from the past : If you select “Friends Only” option, you can prevent your past status updates or any other information from being made public. It means after selecting your information will be seen to your friends only, all previous data will be hide from public search. However, it will still be available for you and your friends.
6) Edit existing Photo Album Privacy : Now, if you want, it’s time to hide your existing photos to hide from the world. Click on “edit album privacy for existing photos” to change your current photo settings of each of your album.
7) Public Search : “Public search” on the Applications and Websites page controls whether people who enter your name in a search engine will see a preview of your Facebook profile. It also controls whether things you’ve specifically chosen to share with everyone show up in searches on and off Facebook. If you don’t want to indexed yourself in Facebook or search engines, you can easily opt-out by clicking on this link and edit settings in front of “Public Search” option in bottom of the page. You are done, now your information is only seen to the person whom you want.
Great, by applying all the above settings, you have maximized your privacy settings on Facebook. There are still lots of options to play around in privacy controls but I believe all the above settings are major ones to do first.
If you have any questions about new Facebook privacy settings, feel free to ask us in the comments section below.