A Comprehensive Guide To The New Facebook Privacy Settings

Facebook is undoubtedly the biggest social network that we have at our disposal today. Millions of people around the world log in to Facebook daily, including myself and you as well. But in recent times if one thing has been a thorn in the side of a vast majority is none other than the Facebook privacy. I believe you’re as tired of Facebook constantly updating and making changes to their privacy settings as I am. Facebook recently introduced new changes or “improvements” as they would call it, to their privacy settings. So I decided to learn more about these privacy settings and write about them for our readers so that you can implement the settings wisely and use Facebook safely according to your own will. Lets face it, at the end of the day, it is we who have to protect our privacy on Facebook and control who we share things with. Facebook can change their settings all they want, it is we who have to learn to implement them ourselves. So here we go.

One thing that you may or may not have noticed is the new tab that Facebook created and dedicated it to the privacy settings menu.

There you see it above. I appreciate this addition that Facebook made. I believe it makes handling the privacy settings alot more easier than it was before. This is because with the previous privacy settings menu, the users had to dig deep and find out which part of which represents what and what does it do. Now, it is all infront of you, so it spares you that effort.

Infact, this little menu has summed up the basic and major aspects of the Facebook privacy settings and presented them to you.

Now on to the details of this menu. The first aspect is “Who can see my stuff?”. As it suggests, it gives you the power to control who can see what information on your timeline. It includes your status updates, the wall posts by others, your pictures and links that you are tagged to. You must have noticed that when you post a status or share a link, there is a little drop down menu there which indicates the audience which the particular post is being shared with, and like you can see in the picture above, if you update it there, the same settings will be updated for all your future posts. The activity log is the place where all your activities on Facebook have been listed. You can review them there. The third feature here is simply amazing, you can view you your timeline as others would be able to view it. It can be general public, or any specific person in your friends list.

Now, to the second part. Here you can control who can contact you through any means. Basically, it deals with who is able to send you messages or friend requests. The message part contains 2 aspects of filtering. Basic filtering is applied automatically. It lets your friends and people you may know, probably friends of friends, send you messages in your inbox. If you’re not satisfied with that and don’t need any unwanted messages in your inbox, you can go for strict filtering.

Finally we have the “How do I stop someone from bothering me?” menu. This deals with the blockage of certain people from your Facebook. It is the same old feature that we know of.

Given all these menus here, if you’re still unable to find the solution to your query, you can always use the search option.

There you see it above. You can type in your problem. Actually, just the keywords, and it will list down all the relevant Facebook help pages that might be able to solve your problem.

Here now is the main page of the privacy settings. It states all the aspects of your privacy that we covered earlier from the privacy tab menu on your home page.

Now here we have a more detailed settings page that concerns with the Timeline and Tagging. Here you can set who can post on your wall. You can put a review check when someone tags you in some link. You can decide who can see the posts by others on your timeline. You can control the settings for the posts that you are tagged in. With the previous privacy settings interface, these details would not have been too apparent, you would have to dig deep to bring them to the surface. But now with the new interface and more explanatory language, they’re already at the surface for you.

Another problem people face is controlling the different apps that can access their Facebook. These apps can sometimes be very annoying and in some cases, they can post on your behalf as well. We know that Facebook has plenty of third party apps that when granted permission, access your Facebook.

Here is the page where you can control such apps, you can set the privacy for particular apps or you can even remove them from the list and prevent any further access to your Facebook by these apps.

Final Verdict

Well, there you have it, I have summed up almost all the Facebook privacy settings for you. Facebook privacy should not be overlooked. When you share information online, you should also know who exactly are you sharing it with. If you don’t, you might have to face unforeseen circumstances. Granted, the settings were not to easy to implement before. But now, I believe everything is totally clear and it should not be a problem for you to take a few moments and set the best privacy settings for you and for your own personal safety. This is all for my “Not-so-comprehensive” guide to Facebook privacy settings. Pun intended. Do not waste any more time and ensure the safety of your information and privacy!