We take a look at three important privacy settings on Facebook that most people don’t use and explain why they’re important.
Facebook seems like a maze of settings, and the social network’s attempts to simplify everything never quite seems to work. It should be a “given” that everyone should use the “friends only” setting applied for their newsfeed to stop strangers seeing everything you post.
But it shouldn’t stop there. There are a number of privacy settings that are not activated or switched on by default, yet they’re still strongly recommended. Here are three such settings…
Review your tags
It’s annoying, but you can’t stop people tagging you in stuff on Facebook, like photos, or check-ins. That, of course, can lead to potentially awkward situations. Especially if, for example, you didn’t want certain Facebook friends to see that you’d been somewhere in particular.
You can, however, reduce the visibility of content you’re tagged in until you approve (or remove) it so there is a lesser chance that your friends will see it. This can be done by enabling the tag review option. Now like we said, tag review doesn’t stop people tagging you, because there isn’t any way of doing that. But it stops content that you’re tagged in appearing on your timeline, which it normally would do.
That means there is a smaller chance of that content then appearing in the newsfeeds of your friends.
It’s still possible that some of your friends will still see it, especially if they’re also friends with the person who uploaded the content. But tag review does give you control over what appears on your timeline and gives you a chance to remove any unwanted tags before they’re given that much visibility.
This setting can be enabled by heading to your main settings, select Timeline & Tagging and then Review posts you’re tagged in before the post appears on your timeline?
Login alerts (and preferably approvals)
At a bare minimum, you should enable login alerts. Crooks are always finding new and inventive ways of compromising Facebook accounts, and if it does happen to you, you need to know about it fast. Login alerts will send you a message, be it email, phone or through a Facebook notification, each time someone logs into your account from an unrecognised device.
Alerts don’t stop people logging in though, so we strongly recommend enabling login approvals, which is Facebook’s answer to two-factor authentication (or two step verification depending on the option.) Enabling this option means that you need more than just your password to login when logging in from a device for the first time. Usually this means getting a code sent to you via text or through an app, but there are other choices too.
If you’re unsure about handing your phone number to Facebook – and we don’t blame you – there are other good options. We recommend using an authenticator program such as Google Authenticator. This generates a code for you to input as well as your password.
You can enable login alerts or two-factor authentication by heading to your settings and selecting Security and Login.
Hide your friends list
Facebook lets everyone see who you’re friends with on Facebook, and this can be dangerous. It gives cyber crooks information about you that you don’t want them to have. It’s especially useful for crooks that clone account by creating a new account with your name and profile picture, because it gives them the ability to send friend requests to all of your friends using that cloned account in a bid to try and scam your friends.
Hiding your friends list prevents crooks from seeing who you’re friends with, meaning creating a clone of your account would be pointless because the crook doesn’t know who to send friend requests to.
You can hide your friends list by going to your profile, clicking on friends and then clicking on the pencil icon. On the mobile app it’s a bit different, since you need to head to your Settings and Privacy, then Settings, then Privacy Settings and scroll down to the relevant option.