Maintaining a professional public image often means controlling access to private information on your Facebook Timeline. By default, your Facebook Timeline and all of your information is public. But if you're willing to navigate through Facebook's maze of privacy settings, you can hide almost all of your Timeline to everyone but your friends. The only thing you can't hide is your Facebook name and profile picture.
The good news is that Facebook has a really handy tool that allows you to hide all of your timeline posts with a single click. Go to Settings and Privacy, select Privacy in the left-hand pane, and click on Limit Past Posts. This option automatically hides all your public posts from the Public and sets them to Friends only.
is my facebook timeline private
Alternatively, you can archive or permanently delete your old timeline posts en masse. Go to the Activity log, select Manage Activity, and then go to Your Posts.
The Social Book Post Manager for Chrome is a useful browser extension that allows you to delete entire months or years from your Facebook timeline. This tool is only available on desktop computers and it can help you delete tens or hundreds of posts in just a few seconds.
If you want to hide previous Facebook posts from the public, you can use the Limit Past Posts option. On the other hand, if you want to hide future posts, go to Settings and under Who can see your future posts, select Only Friends or Only me. Alternatively, you can also archive or trash old posts from your timeline. Why did you decide to hide your Facebook posts? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
What did you think of our instructions for how to make your Facebook private? Were they clear and easy to follow? Do you think we missed some crucial privacy settings? Let us know in the comments below. Thank you for reading.
If you post directly on their timeline, they control the privacy setting. They have just one setting for all posts that others post on their timeline. If they have it set to Friends, then only their friends will be able to see it. If they have it set to Friends of Friends or Public then your friends (and all other friends of friends) will be able to see it as well.
An alternative is to post on your own timeline and tag them. This will give you more control over the privacy setting. If you post to your friends then you can choose whether to make it visible to the friends of anyone that is tagged as well (in the Custom dialog), and can exclude some of your friends if you don't want all of your friends to see it.
The options we talked about above control your entire Facebook account. But whenever you post something, you can give it its own privacy settings. This means you can keep your profile private but make a single post public, and vice versa.
There are many reasons you should make your photos private on Facebook. Aside from privacy concerns, the site is also teeming with unscrupulous scammers who want to take advantage of other people on the platform.
To deal with this issue, Facebook has customizable settings that allow you to restrict access to your photos or hide your photos from others. You can set some to be viewable only by your friends or make them completely private and only viewable to you.
To make photos private on Facebook, you can change the privacy settings of entire albums or individual photos. Of course, the easy way on how to hide photos on Facebook is the former, so we'll start with that one.
If you don't want to make the photos completely private and still want to share them, just with a more limited audience, you can choose the audience options for Friends, Friends except, or Specific friends.
Once you know which photos you want to set to private, leave View As public mode by clicking on your thumbnail in the top right corner of your screen or clicking back. Alternatively, tap Exit View As.
Having a Facebook privacy and security checklist that you go through regularly will help make sure you catch any of these photos right away. Remember that the longer these photos are shared publicly on social media, the higher the chances of a scammer getting a hold of them. Although this helps, you can make your Facebook private if you need more security.
Reviewing your social media accounts and changing the audience settings of your photos to private is a good cyber hygiene practice. It will not only protect your data but will also protect the privacy of your loved ones who may be in the pictures you upload.
It's possible to limit the visibility of old photos and posts by making them private instead of deleting them entirely. From your Timeline, click the ellipsis next to the post you want to hide, select Edit Audience (Edit Privacy on mobile), then select who should have permission to view the post. Choose Only me to hide it from everyone else. To only hide the post from certain people, select Friends except... or Specific friends... to include or exclude certain friends.
While this will mean that no one else will be able to see anything a friend has posted on your timeline, you can take solace in the fact that no one will be able to see your potentially embarrassing old wall posts either.
Dear Facebookers - Your private inbox messages are now visible for all to see, from 2009 and later. This could get VERY awkward, very quickly... this is a new change from Facebook as of yesterday. Don't believe me? Read your timeline from those years... yikes! They look like wall posts..... they are not!
Origins: The September 2012 warning reproduced above, about a recent change to Facebook supposedly making users' private inbox messages visible to everyone, proved to be a false alarm. According to a 25 September 2012 article from Mashable (via CNN):
Rumors of a Facebook bug has users from all over the world worried about private messages showing up very publicly on Timeline pages. But the social network is debunking those claims, saying these messages are actually just older wall posts.
Some members in the U.S. have said their private messages from 2007 and 2008 are showing up on their Timeline, but Facebook said that the company hasn't found a bug and believes the discrepancy comes from a wider roll out of the newer Timeline layout on a global scale.
Facebook says that if you can comment or Like that activity, then it is a wall post and not a private message. In the past, users weren't able to comment and Like posts, so Facebook believes members new to Timeline are confusing old posts for private messages.
Here on the Tech team, we checked our own Facebook accounts to make sure. Indeed, older posts were showing up on our Timelines. But they were not the private emails, or direct messages, that are sent between Facebook users and are not visible to anyone else.
A small number of users raised concerns after what they mistakenly believed to be private messages appeared on their Timeline. Our engineers investigated these reports and found that the messages were older wall posts that had always been visible on the users' profile pages. Facebook is satisfied that there has been no breach of user privacy.
Facebook today received a huge backlash as millions of users saw what they believe to be their private messages from 2009 and earlier show up on their Facebook Timeline for all their friends to see. While Facebook is denying these allegations, saying that every report it has checked just shows old wall posts, readers continue to write in claiming otherwise, pointing to addresses and phone numbers that they insist were not posted on Walls for all their friends to see.
Privacy issues and privacy controls on Facebook are ever-changing, and I've read through hundreds of comments and emails from our readers who are confused about how to keep their information private and what specific Facebook privacy settings actually do.
For example, when you post a picture of your kids at a family gathering, which of your Facebook friends can share it? What private information are those Facebook game apps collecting for "third-party uses"? How do you make sure that your live video stream is seen only by the people you choose?
In this section, you can check your profile information, settings for Posts and Stories, and settings for blocking people. You can limit your audience to just you, your Facebook Friends, or Custom lists that you create. For instance, you can create a family list, acquaintances list, or work list. Go to facebook.com/friends and click on Custom Lists to get started.
You can also choose who can see your friends list on your profile page by going directly to www.facebook.com/settings?tab=privacy, and you'll find the option in the "How People Find and Contact You" section.
When you post a new profile picture or change other information that you've made available to "Everyone," you can still limit who can like or comment. If you want to limit what random people can say on your profile pictures, go to www.facebook.com/settings?tab=followers, and you can select "Friends," "Friends of Friends," or "Everyone."
When you create a public post, everyone on Facebook can see it. However, you can limit who gets to comment on your public posts. Go to www.facebook.com/settings?tab=followers, and you can select "Friends," "Friends of Friends," or "Everyone."
You can limit the people who can post on your profile page from "Only me" up to including "Everyone." Go to www.facebook.com/settings?tab=timeline, and you'll find this option in the Viewing and Sharing section. My advice is to keep it to Friends or Friend of Friends, unless you enjoy random comments from strangers.
If you're concerned about crude language appearing on your profile page, you can add up to 1,000 keywords that will cause a post to be hidden. The post will still remain visible to the people who posted and their Facebook Friends. Go to www.facebook.com/settings?tab=timeline, and you'll find this option in the Viewing and Sharing section. Though you're probably better off just limiting who can post to your profile above to Friends (unless your friends are the problem!) 2ff7e9595c