How to Improve Your Privacy and Security on Facebook

Facebook and other social media platforms are a double-edged sword. On the one hand they give us somewhere that we can communicate with our friends and family as well as upload our memories, photos and thoughts onto. On the other hand, the availability to be hacked or to have someone go through your account or profile to find personal information out is incredibly easy.

We’re going to give you a few ways that you can improve the security and privacy of your account so that while the odds of something aren’t fully eliminated, you’re in a much better position.

How To Improve Your Privacy And Security

First things first you’re going to want to log into your Facebook account from a desktop (or through the web browser on your device) and you’ll click on the little downward arrow in the top right hand corner (next to the question mark icon). Then find the option for “Settings” and then finally “Privacy”.

You’ll be shown a few options here that you can change to improve your privacy:

Who can see your future posts:

This is the first option you can change. Changing this setting will restrict or allow which people can see the content you post. Ideally you’ll want this set to “friends” so that people can see your posts. Setting this to “everyone” will mean that anyone can see what you’ve been up to, whether you’re friends or not.

Who can see your friends list: 

Depending on what you change this to, either everyone, just your friends or just you can access and see your friends list. Having this set to “everyone” would mean that anybody could look through your friends, even if you’re not friends with them. We suggest changing this to either “only me” or “friends”.

Do you want search engines outside of Facebook to link to your profile:

By default this is set to “Yes” which means that if you go ahead and type your name into Google, your profile will appear in the search. Setting this to “No” would prevent people being able to search for your name on search engines and subsequently find you. We recommend that you change this setting to no.

Who can look you up using the e-mail address you provided/mobile number you provided:

There are two options, one for your e-mail address and one for your mobile number. If you want anybody to be able to find you using these methods then leave it as “everyone”. For more privacy then set it to “friends”.

Changing these settings will remove your profile from web searches, prevent people who you don’t know from accessing your friend list, stop people gaining private information such as your mobile number and much more. We highly suggest you adjust yours to prevent random people trying to communicate with you or to prevent them from having access to your private information.