By default, Facebook keeps your profile public. If you want to restrict unknown people to visit your profile, message you, and know what you share and like, you can limit their access by altering your privacy settings.
This article explains how to make Facebook private and how can you limit the access of unknown visitors and send spam messages.
How to make Facebook private?
Following are the steps from which you can make your Facebook profile private through a desktop browser. Here’s what you can do:
1. Go to your web browser and type in www.facebook.com
2. Write your credentials to log in to your profile
3. Look for the dropdown menu from the arrow located on the top right corner of the window.
4. Look for the settings option from the dropdown menu. Here, select ‘settings’
5. At the settings menu, look for the privacy option on the left. Selecting it will open a privacy window on the right.
6. Here you will have more than one option. You can change multiple privacy options and select the preferred settings.
Here, you can edit who can send you friends requests, who can see your posts, provided email address and phone number, and if you don’t want the search engine to locate you when people search similar names, you can also edit these settings.
7. Select the desired options from the public, friends, friends of friends, and only me.
Apart from these settings, several other settings are there which you may want to edit and apply privacy settings on them. Let’s see how can you apply privacy to your profile picture.
How to make a Facebook profile picture private?
When someone locates your profile or reads your comment on a post, the first thing that they come across after your comment is your profile picture. It can be enlarged by just clicking once on the picture unless it is protected.
To make it protected, here’s what you can do:
- Log in to Facebook by entering your log-in credentials.
- Click on your profile photo located on the top right corner of your screen. This will open your profile where you can make your required adjustments.
- Here you will find the ‘Photos’ tab among other 6 tabs which include Posts, About, Friends, Photos, Archive, and More. Select Photos.
- On the Photos menu, select Album from three highlighted options – Photos of You, Your Photos, and Album.
- By selecting Albums, you will see all the photos that you have been sharing on your Facebook Profile segregated into different albums. Choose Profile Pictures from the Albums.
- Click on the Profile Picture and look for three dots on the right and explore options.
- Once you click on the three dots, a dropdown menu will appear. Select edit audience from the options.
- Adjust the audience to view your profile picture. Whether you want your profile picture to view by your friends, certain people from your friends, keep it public, or just be viewed by you only.
This is how you can change your privacy settings using your desktop browser. However, there’s a slight change in the settings when you need to edit privacy settings on your mobile through Facebook App.
Making your Facebook Profile Private on the Facebook App
Most of us use our Facebook App on our mobile phones and sometimes those notifications from unknown visitors and spam messages become the most annoying thing of all.
If you want to block those rings for the rest of your life, then you should know the process of being private.
- Install Facebook App from iStore or Playstore from your iPhone or Android cellphone.
- A burger icon which typically represented by three lines underneath the messenger icon. Tap on that and look for Settings and Privacy.
- Go to settings and click on the privacy tap on the Privacy settings. Under privacy shortcut, look for ‘check a few important settings’.
- Here, you can see who can see your posts and future content. Edit your privacy features and select the one which you find desirable.
- Scroll all over the options to select the one from friends, public, only me, and some other options.
- Select the ones and keep tapping next to reach the desired option.
- Select the options you want for future posts as well.
- Keep selecting the desired privacy option from the list and tapping next until you make everything private.
The process of editing your privacy settings on your iPhone is not different from an Android. You can follow the same settings to edit your settings.
