Facebook is meant to help us connect with people around the world. It might have noble intentions at the start, but over the years, it’s been plagued by bots and fake accounts designed to spam and scam, which is why making your Facebook account private might be a good idea.
It also helps prevent people from potentially stalking and harassing you or bullying you, a problem that the internet seems to be having these days. Thankfully, the process of making your Facebook account private is quick and simple, so here’s what you need to do if you’re looking to close off your Facebook account from strangers on the internet.
Limit who can see your future posts
Now that you’ve decided to take steps to make your Facebook profile private, changing who can see your future Facebook posts is a step in that direction. You can choose to limit it to just people who are your Friends, and even within them you can narrow it down to specific groups of friends, or you can choose to just limit them to yourself if you just want to use Facebook as a log of sorts.
- Go to your Facebook’s Settings
- Click Privacy on the sidebar on the left
- Under Your Activity, you can choose who can see your future posts, posts that you’ve already shared, and also who can see the Pages or Groups that you follow. Click on Edit and you can choose between allowing posts to be viewed by the Public, which is everyone; your friends; your friends with some exceptions; or only visible to yourself.
Limit who can see your past posts
So now you’ve already changed who can see your future posts, but what about your older posts? You might not have been so careful with your privacy in the past, but now you’re having some regrets, but the steps below will help you limit those older posts to just your Friends only.
- Go to your Facebook’s Settings
- Click Privacy on the sidebar on the left
- Under Your Activity, select Limit The Audience for Old Posts on Your Timeline and click “Limit Past Posts”
- What this does is that all posts that you’ve already made that are either shared with Friends of friends or Public will now be limited to just Friends only. You can make further edits to limit them to just yourself, but depending on how many posts you’ve made, you’ll need to go through them one by one
Make your Facebook profile harder to discover
It’s not that hard to find people on Facebook either using their phone number, email address, or their name, but if you’d rather not be discoverable on Facebook, or rather make it harder, then here’s what you need to do.
- Go to your Facebook’s Settings
- Click Privacy on the sidebar on the left
- Under How People Find and Contact You, you can now change who can send you friend requests, who can see your friends list, and who can look you up using your phone number or email address. You can also set it to prevent search engines outside of Facebook to link to your profile, making yourself harder to be discovered on platforms like Google, Bing, and so on