While Facebook is a way to share photos and other posts with your friends, you may want to keep your posts private from certain people. If you don’t want your co-workers, ex-boyfriends, etc. to find you on Facebook you can take these steps to make yourself “invisible”. If you’re concerned with Facebook tracking your information the best step to take is to delete your account, but you can hide from other Facebook users.
Lock Down Your Profile
Facebook lets you choose who can see your profile and certain details of your profile. By locking down your profile so only your friends can see it, you prevent people you don’t know from knowing details like where you live or who you’re friends with. Your profile paints a very complete picture of who you are and what you do. Hackers could potentially use this information to target you with a phishing attack. To prevent this kind of hack, you should only display the details of your profile with people you know.
Limit Who Can See Old Posts
You can control who sees your past posts, and it’s a good idea to keep these posts private. When someone adds you as a friend, you can configure your privacy settings to only allow people to see your posts from since you’ve been friends. If you’re applying for a job, odds are that your potential employer will check your Facebook account. While having something there for them to see is a good sign, you can minimize your risk by hiding your old posts.
Post Only to Selected Friends
When you publish a post on Facebook, you can choose which of your friends or friend groups can see the post. You can limit certain posts only to close friends to prevent others from viewing the posts. Set up specific groups like “Close Friends”, “Family” and “Co-Workers” to share your posts only with select people. This prevents other Facebook users from seeing certain photos or posts that you’d prefer to keep private.
Hide Your Age and Birthday
Your birthday combined with your name can give someone enough information to uncover other details about your personal life. While your birthday may seem like a harmless bit of information to share, someone could combine your birthday, your name, and other information from your profile to crack your other accounts. Removing details like these from your profile can help minimize your risk of falling victim to identity theft. The less data you give away, the less chance you have of being the victim of cyber crime.
Hide Your Friend List
Keeping your friends list private will probably do more for your friends’ privacy rather than your own. However, who you’re connected with could reveal other information about you, like where you went to school or where you work.
Limit Who Can Add You as a Friend
If you want to avoid strangers adding you as a friend on Facebook, you can limit who can add you as a friend. Rather than letting everyone send you requests, you can choose to only allow friends of friends to add you as a friend. Someone could create an account impersonating one of your friends to try to get information from you. If you don’t allow these types of users to add you as a friend, you make it more difficult to give in to a phishing attack.
Block Select Users
If a Facebook user has been harassing you, or you just want to prevent a given person from seeing your Facebook profile, you can block that user. Blocking someone on Facebook prevents them from seeing your profile, from seeing you in search results. If you have been blocked, it will appear as if the person who has blocked you never existed. When you block someone they will not be able to tell that you blocked them, it will just appear as if your account has been deleted.
Remove Location Information
To prevent other Facebook users from knowing your location, check to make sure you aren’t including location tags on your Facebook posts. “Checking In” at a certain location tells all of your friends where you are at that time. This may seem useful, but is actually quite a privacy risk. If you insist on sharing your location, it’s best to only share that information with close friends.
Keep Your Events Private
Do not let other Facebook users see which events you are attending. They could use that information to determine when you won’t be home to coordinate a robbery. Or they could find you at the event, even if you didn’t want someone to be able to find you.
Don’t Let Facebook Use Facial Recognition to Identify You In Photos
When your friends upload photos, Facebook will usually suggest tagging people that it recognizes in the photos. You can turn off this feature so that if someone uploads a photo of you, Facebook will not suggest tagging you in the photo.
To turn off Facial Recognition on Facebook, go to settings and click on ‘Face Recognition‘. Then, click ‘Edit’ and in the drop-down menu select ‘No’.
How To Be Invisible on Facebook Messenger
Appear Offline To Certain Friends
If you want to use Facebook without your friends seeing that you are online on Messenger, you can control who can see when you are online. Even if you appear to be offline to certain users, you will still be able to see when they are online.
You can select “Turn Off Active Status” in your Messenger settings so that other users won’t be able to see that you are online.