If Facebook opened up a call center to answer your technical questions about the site, what’s the No. 1 question you would ask? In this weeklong series, we will serve as your help desk! Bookmark this page and be sure to share this series with your Facebook friends. In this post, we tackle privacy concerns.
Control who can see your status updates. The secret to controlling who can read your status update lies in the drop-down menu next to the blue "Post" button. When you click on the arrow, you can change who the post will be visible to. If you want to make it visible to all of your friends except a for certain people, click on "Custom." Under “Hide this from,” enter the names of the people you don’t want to see the post. If you have lists enabled, you can make it visible only to people on a specific list.
Control who sees your photos. To get to these options, click on your profile picture to go to your timeline, click on "Photos," and then click on "Albums." The key here is to pay attention to the little symbols below the title of the album. In the example on slide two, you can see the album labeled "ATL" is only visible to friends. See the friend symbol? The globe symbol next to the "What we wore" and "color" albums means they are available to anyone on Facebook; they're public. To change the setting, just click on the symbol and select who you want to make it available to, just like with your status update.
Under "Mobile Uploads" and "Instagram Photos" you will see a gear symbol. That means the privacy of each and every photo can be adjusted. In order to edit who sees what photo, go into the album and click on the individual photo. Once it's full screen, look under your name at the top right. There you will see the privacy drop down to adjust the setting. Click on slide three to see this example.
For these next few features, you need to be on the "Privacy Settings" page. You can find it under the drop-down menu at the very top right corner of the page. See slide four for a visual aide.
Control which photos you get tagged in. In your privacy settings, you have the ability to approve any post you are tagged in before it appears on your timeline. You can also review the posts to decide whether or not you want to be tagged in the first place. All you have to do is click on “Edit Settings” next to “Timeline and Tagging.”
The key to controlling what appears on your timeline is under the option marked “Review posts friends tag you in before they appear on your timeline.” This should be enabled.
If you want to control what you are tagged in, click on “Review tags friends add to your own posts on Facebook.” Again, this should be enabled.
Control who can find you on Facebook. In your privacy settings, click on “Edit Settings” next to “How You Connect.” Here you can decide if people can find you using the email address or phone number associated with your account. You can also decide who can send you friend requests and Facebook messages.
Control who can see your old posts. Facebook privacy changes often confuse people. Those who were once confident their entire profile was on lockdown can find their photos or very old status updates available for public viewing. To avoid that frustration, Facebook has created a button to limit past posts. Just click on “Manage Past Post Visibility.”
Facebook will give you a warning, saying all of your content will now default to friends only. If you are good with this, click on the blue “Limit Old Posts” button.
Did all this help? I hope so. We'll be monitoring the comments, so leave your feedback below. If anything needs further clarification, I'll update this story.
Tuesday we'll show you how you can report bullying or offensive images to Facebook.
You can follow Anna Gonzalez at Facebook.com/webanna and at Twitter.com/webanna.
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