5 Ways To Protect Your Facebook Account

Reaching maximum privacy with your Facebook account now requires clicking through 50 different settings and over 170 different options. And that isn't even close to completely safeguarding your personal information.

Facebook's current privacy policy is about 5800 words. This makes it about 1200 words longer than the Constitution of the United States. How many of us are going to wade through that? It's impossible to achieve total privacy on Facebook, but there are ways to maximize your protection. Here are 5 ways to protect your Facebook account;

1.  Hide your profile information from the public. It could be argued whether the average user needs to hide their profile information or not, but every child should be protected as much as possible. This may require parents to be proactive and check the settings for their children.

In the upper right hand of the Facebook page (either from your home page or profile page) Click Account > Privacy Settings > Personal Information and Posts. Make sure to adjust privacy for all 9 categories. Most of these should be set as "Only Friends", but you can set them to "Only Me".

Click the  Back to Privacy button in the upper left of the screen. Click   Contact Information. Adjust your privacy settings for all 8 of these categories. Most if not all should be set as "Only Friends".

Now Click  Back to Privacy > Friends, Tags & Connections. Adjust all 10 categories. If you don't want information about you to leak to strangers, DO NOT set to "Everyone".


2.  Protect yourself from Facebook ads. Yes, Facebook uses your information for advertising purposes and your friends may see your name in some advertising or may be able to see your actions to social ads.

To protect your information from ads, click  Account > Account Settings > Facebook Ads and select "No One" beside Allow ads on platform pages to show my information to, and then scroll down to Show my social actions in Facebook Ads to and do the same.


3.  Remove yourself from The Instant Personalization Pilot Program. Your profile information is shared with thid party web sites currently including Microsoft Docs, Pandora and Yelp.

In the upper right hand corner of the Facebook page, click Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites. Click Edit Setting beside Instant Personalization Program and uncheck the box at the bottom of the screen.


4.  Control what information your friends may be sharing about you. Even if you uncheck the box for the Instant Personalization Pilot Program, your information may still be accessed by websites through your friends. Unless you block each individual website's applications. Your friends may be sharing your information with applications and third party websites that you don't even use. Note that ALL applications are able to access your Name, Profile Picture, Gender, as well as any information that is visible to Everyone.

Click Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites > What your friends can share about you and uncheck all of the boxes.


5.  Monitor which devices may access your Facebook account. This tool was just released in the past week, but has not been advertised as of this post. After making this change, you will be asked to name the computer or device you are using to access Facebook. You will then receive an email with the name of the device used. This will allow you to know if someone logs into your account from another computer.

click Account > Account Settings > Account Security. Click "YES" below Would you like to receive notifications for logins from new devices?



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