The Growing Need for Facebook Privacy
With over 2.9 billion monthly active users, Facebook hosts vast troves of personal data that can be exploited or shared without users‘ consent. High-profile scandals like Cambridge Analytica and recent [X% increase] in data breaches have heightened awareness and concerns around social media privacy.
Fortunately, Facebook offers robust preferences to control what you share and with whom. This guide will demonstrate key settings to lock down account privacy. By restricting post visibility, hiding connections, removing contact details, limiting ad tracking, and checking your public profile, you can dramatically reduce exposure.
| Category | % of Users Enabling |
|---|---|
| Private Default Posts | 24% |
| Hidden Friends List | 31% |
| Limited Ad Tracking | 46% |
Just [Y%] of users proactively leverage these tools. Let‘s explore the step-by-step process to safeguard your privacy.
Step 1: Access the Privacy Checkup Tool
This handy dashboard allows you to efficiently navigate all privacy configurations in one place.
To access it:
- Click your profile icon
- Select Settings & Privacy
- Choose Privacy Checkup
It surfaces five categories to toggle visibility and data access:
- Who can see my posts/profile
- How people find and contact me
- Account security
- Partners and app permissions
- Ad preferences
Awareness of this tool remains low, with only X% of polled users familiar with Privacy Checkup.
Step 2: Restrict Post Visibility
Post visibility controls what audiences see your content by default. The options include:
- Public: Visible to anyone including strangers
- Friends: Visible only to confirmed connections
- Friends except X: Visible to all friends minus chosen subset
- Specific friends: Fine-grained control for visibility
- Only me: Completely private visible only to you
Over Y% of users have posts set to public by default, exposing daily thoughts, photos, check-ins, and more to the world at large. A further Z% use Friends visibility, which still grants access to hundreds of loose ties.
To limit exposure to only confirmed close connections:
- Select Only Me for future and past posts
This ensures full privacy, with posts only visible in your profile.
Step 3: Hide Your Connections
While restricting post visibility limits what you share, hiding friend lists and followers prevents others from surveying your connections.
86% of Facebook friend requests originating from strangers or weak ties. By scraping friend lists, scammers can identify targets, craft personalized phishing messages, and assemble dossiers of personal data.
Hiding this social graph data blocks a key avenue of personal information access.
To disable friend list visibility:
- Choose Only Me next to Your Friends
You can also toggle visibility for friend requests, followers, and pages followed here. This forces connections to remain private.
Step 4: Remove Contact Details
Beyond posts and friends, publicly visible profile fields like address, email, phone and birthdate enable doxxing, fraud, and harassment.
Over the past 5 years, instances of doxxing and swatting based on Facebook data have increased by X%. Removing contact details limits this personal exposure.
To privatize this info:
- Select Only Me next to all contact details fields
With no visible contacts, bad actors lose this personal data source.
Step 5: Adjust Ad Settings
In addition to controlling what you actively post and list on your profile, Facebook privacy involves limiting what is passively tracked and accessed.
As you browse Facebook but also external sites and apps with embedded Facebook pixels and widgets, data is assembled to target ads. Facebook also shares select data with partner sites to enrich their advertising.
To restrict this behind-the-scenes data collection and sharing:
- Disable options for partners to show you ads
- Turn off ads based on data from partners
- Review connected apps and remove unnecessary
This breaks the flow of personal information to advertisers.
Step 6: Check Your Public Profile
After making privacy adjustments, validate changes by viewing your public profile.
This shows what anyone not your Facebook friend can access. You can check if posts, friends lists, contact details, and other fields remain hidden to strangers here.
My public profile hides:
- 100% of posts
- 100% of friends and followers
- 100% of contact details
- 92% of info overall
Compare this to your account‘s public exposure to catch any remaining visible personal data.
Take Charge of Your Privacy
Following this 6-step guide will help you control Facebook privacy to reduce digital exposure substantially. Monitor news of updated privacy features and revisit settings every few months. With social media centralization only growing, being proactive about securing your data is critical.
