With Facebook holding so much information about you, from your name and personal details through to images you upload, photos you are tagged in, updates from milestones and celebrations you’ve been involved in, and locations you’ve visited, it’s safe to say that someone can discover a lot about you through your profile.
Of course, while some of this information is obvious, there are other details that you may not want to disclose to a broad audience – especially those who are not your friends on Facebook but who may stumble across your profile.
Which is where Facebook’s privacy settings come in.
One of the leading features on Facebook is its privacy settings and the different levels of visibility that users can attach to their profile. Using the different privacy settings, users can adjust who can see information across their profile, changing the audience from ‘Only Me’ all the way through to ‘Public’ should they choose to.
In this article, we’re uncovering the process for setting your Facebook profile audience to ‘Friends’, hiding your personal details and other information from any users who are not already connected to you as a friend.
3 Steps to Change Your Profile Audience Settings
- Click on the menu button in the bottom right hand corner of the page
- Select ‘Settings and Privacy’ then ‘Settings’
- Scroll down to ‘Followers and Public Content’, and click on this menu option
Within this ‘Followers and Public Content’ page, you will see a number of questions regarding visibility and who can see and engage with different parts of your profile and content.
If any of these are set to ‘Public’, it means that any and every user can interact with the content, whether they are a friend or not.
To change any of these details so that they are private to non-friends on Facebook, click on the blue audience box and change it to ‘Friends’.
One Stop Shop to Making Your Profile Private
While the above process offers you the ability to adjust different pieces of information and content, there is a way to lock down your profile and make every part of it private and visible to Friends only.
To do this, head into your Settings as above and then select ‘Default Audience Settings’ from the top segment of the menu.
If you choose to assign the audience on each block of content and part of your account manually, then this check box will be defaulted to select ‘Custom’. This means that you are assigning different privacy and visibility settings on different parts of your profile.
To make your Facebook completely private in one quick move, change this from ‘Custom’ to ‘Friends’. From then on, only those who you are directly friends with on Facebook will see your updates and profile information.
Suffice to say, whether you adjust your privacy via this one-stop menu option or choose to set custom visibility across your profile and content, Facebook offers a range of options – making privacy and security very easy to manage. We hope this helps!
