Category Archives: Hide Likes from Timeline

Adjust Default Privacy Settings, Facebook, Hide Facebook Likes, Hide Likes from Timeline, Layered Privacy

The Ultimate Facebook Like Guide – Part Two

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Our last post detailed how to hide or unhide your Facebook Likes ‘box’. Here’s that post: Part One of the Ultimate Facebook Likes Guide  In that post, we showed you how to control the privacy of each like. Since that part is a bit confusing, here’s a guide to the whole ‘Like’ section.

Before we begin, some explanation is required. The ‘likes’ we are talking about here are those that pertain to your interests, things such as Music, Television, Books, etc. None of this applies to photos or comments that you click ‘like’ on. As you know, those ‘likes’ are controlled by the owner’s privacy settings, not yours. Are we clear on that? If you like Ally’s photo, only Ally controls who sees either the photo or the fact that you like it. The only way to hide your ‘like’ is to ‘unlike’ it. Same goes for your comments, your liking a comment, etc. You control things that you post. You do not control anything that you do not post.

Second point: Some things, such as Music and Film, can only be hidden or shown as a group. If you like the Beatles and want to show everyone that you do, you can show them ALL of the music you like. If you like the Backstreet Boys and DO NOT want anyone to know that, you have to hide ALL of the music that you like. If you’ve got your main section settings set to ‘Friends’ or ‘Public’, and you happen to add Britney Spears to your Music likes, everyone will know. The ONLY way you can hide it is to remove poor old Britney from your list or hide the whole section.

Let’s get started. From your Timeline, click on Update Info. The rest of this post flows down from the top to the bottom of the page that comes up next after you click Update Info.

Photo of Ultimate Guide 1
Hide everything by clicking the Edit icon and selecting Hide Section.

 

Working down from the top, let’s see what you can hide and what you can’t.

1. About – You can hide different parts of your information. Click the Edit icon in each section to see what you can hide.

2. TV programmes – It’s all or one for this. Show everything or hide everything.

3. Books – All or none.

4. Films – All or none

5. Music – All or none.

6. Music – All or none.

7. Friends – Show all or hide all EXCEPT for mutual friends. If you have a mutual friend with someone, you can’t hide that.

8. Photos – You have complete control of all of your photos EXCEPT your Timeline cover photos. Please remember that you can’t hide your cover photos. We said that twice simply to emphasize it. If you have a questionable cover photo, everyone who sees your Facebook profile, even if they are not friends of yours, can see it.

9. Games (Recent Games, actually) – All or none.

10. Places – All or none.

That’s it for the sections of your ‘likes’ or your favorites. (Maybe everyone should start to use the term favorites instead of likes. It gets confusing otherwise, right? Read on….)

OK, now we are into the last section of these favorites. Conveniently, Facebook has named them Likes! The final section is divided up into these categories:

Other Likes, Inspirational People, Sports, Sports Teams, Athletes, Games, Activities and Interests. 

In previous posts, we’ve used the term ‘page likes’ for these items. Until recently, you could hide some of your individual likes but now it’s different. For better or worse, you only get to show or hide ALL of each category.  Click on any of the topics at the top of your Likes section. Most of them would probably be under the heading ‘Other Likes’, at least they were for us. Now you don’t have to worry about hiding some but showing others. It’s easy to hide them all. Click the edit icon on the right side and choose Edit Privacy. Here’s what you see:

Photo of Ultimate Guide 2
Choose your privacy settings here.

 

If a Facebook page doesn’t fall into one of the main categories, it will be placed under ‘Other Likes’. Keep that in mind. As you scan your individual likes, you’ll see a sub-heading under the name. Some may be Theatre or Travel Agency or something completely different. Weixin, for instance, is listed as an ‘Interest’ under ‘Activities’. Weixin or WeChat really isn’t an activity, it’s a bit of software.  Somehow it’s shown as an interest. Go figure.

We mention this because you may decide to show your ‘like’ of Inspirational People. Well, if you look at the list of inspirational people, you may be quite surprised at who Facebook deems ‘influential’. You may be expecting Mother Theresa but Charlize Theron shows up in the suggestion box. If you’ve chosen to Like Theron and expect her to show up under ‘Other Likes’ that you’ve hidden, you’d be surprised to find out that she’s in the Inspirational People section that you’ve chosen to show. See what we mean?

TIP: Facebook uses your Likes and Interests (Favorites) to tune the ads that you see on your pages. If you like Guitars, you will see Guitar ads. It’s that simple. Choosing a certain genre of movie or a certain type of music will almost certainly put you into an age demographic that Facebook will mine for ads that you just might click on. If do, they make money. Keep that in mind when you’re blithely ‘liking’ things that you see on Facebook.

There’s more to this than meets the eye, isn’t there? In our next post we’re going to get into these likes in more detail. Now you know what you can hide and what you can’t, we’ll work on some deeper concepts next time.

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

 

 

Adjust Default Privacy Settings, Controlled sharing, Facebook, Facebook page likes, Facebook Secrets, Facebook Tricks, Hide Game Updates, Hide Likes from Timeline

How to Hide Anything on Facebook

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It seems we’ve been writing about Facebook for longer than Facebook has been around. Judging from the popularity of our “Hiding Likes on Facebook” posts, everyone has something to hide. In this post, which will be a long one, all we’re going to do is post screen captures of as many Facebook menus as we can find. In some photos you won’t see a menu but in the next one, we’ll show you where to find it.

Before we begin, there are two caveats here. First, while we’ll show you how to hide almost everything on Facebook, some of those things may pop up in other areas. Consider the fact that liking a page is different from showing that like later on in a series of your ‘likes’. Liking and showing likes are two different things. For this reason, we suggest that you don’t do something on Facebook that would cause you grief later on in your life or your career.

Secondly, there are two things that you cannot hide on Facebook. First, photos that you post cannot be completely hidden. You can selectively choose who can see the photo but you can’t completely hide it. Think about it. Facebook employees can see the photo, right? Even if the privacy settings for that photo are set to ‘Only Me’, someone at Facebook can see it.

Lastly, you cannot hide mutual friends from anyone. Yes, you can partially hide your friend list but you can’t hide the fact that you have a mutual friend with someone. If being friends with someone will cause problems in your life, especially if that person is a friend of a friend, you can’t hide it. We can see many situations where this would cause a problem so keep this in mind when you’re ‘friending’ someone.

TIP: Why did we say that you could partially hide your friend list? Read this post and you will see why. You can set your friend list’s privacy to ‘Only Me’ but that won’t prevent Facebook from suggesting every one of your friends to someone else. Here’s the link to the post: Stalking Friends on Facebook

Here we go with the screen caps:

Photo of HIde 1
Most things that you’ve done are shown on your Activity Log, available from your Timeline.

 

Photo of HIde 2
On the right side of almost all items shown, there is an edit icon which allows you to hide that activity from your Timeline.

 

TIP: Remember that you can’t hide comments that you make on something that you did not post. Keep that in mind. If you like a photo that someone else posted, you can’t hide it. Same thing for a comment on a photo. You can’t hide that either. All of those things are controlled by the privacy settings that the other person used. Make sure you understand this before you go randomly clicking ‘Like’ on photos or making comments on things posted by other people.

Photo of HIde 3
On your Timeline, you can find the edit icon up on the top right of most boxes.

 

Photo of HIde 4
You can check on story types that you have hidden. Seems we haven’t hidden any…yet.

 

Photo of HIde 5
Here, we’ve hidden three types of activity.

 

Photo of HIde 6
Click the arrow to open up all the boxes in your Favourites. Only then can you edit them.

 

Photo of HIde 7
You can swap positions or remove the box from your Favorites.

 

 

Photo of HIde 8
If the box menu isn’t open, you can’t edit any of the Favorite boxes. Click the arrow just to the right of the 4.

 

 

Photo of HIde 9
See? Now the Places or Maps box can be edited.

 

Photo of HIde 10
You can check what posts you’ve hidden by looking at your Activity Log and choosing the correct link on the left.

 

Photo of HIde 11
Here is the full list of activities that you can check by clicking More down near the bottom (shown as Less here).

 

Photo of HIde 12
Hide all of your game posts here. Click the Stop Publishing Activity. Please do this for your friends!

 

 

Photo of Hide 13
Hide all Friending activity here.

 

Photo of Hide 14
Here’s where you can hide your friend list from everyone or from some people, Choose ‘Custom’ to select specific people or lists.

 

This has been a long post, we know that, but we think you’ll be able to find most of what you’re looking for here. If not, let us know! We love questions.

Thanks for reading! Follow us on Facebook. Just click Like and you’ll get our updates and tech tips as soon as we post them: Computers Made Simple on Facebook

Controlled sharing, Facebook, Facebook page likes, Facebook Secrets, Facebook Tricks, Hide Likes from Timeline, Layered Privacy

Hiding Likes on Facebook – it’s back!

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We’ve written quite a few posts on hiding your likes in Facebook. After months of confusion, it seems that Facebook has reverted back to their old system of hiding or showing likes. Here’s the latest, January 2013, version of hiding your likes:

1. Go to your Timeline page by clicking on your name up on the top right. Once you’re there, look for the boxes of favorites, the ones marked Friends, Photos, etc. Here’s what you are looking for:

Photo of Likes Box
If your Likes box is on the top or bottom row, doesn’t matter. Click either the word Likes or inside the box.

 

2. If you can see your Likes box, click on it. If you can”t see your Likes box, it might be in the second row of Favorites. (There are only two rows and only eight possible boxes.)  Click on the little arrow to the right of the first row to bring the next row into view. Like this:

Photo of two rows of Favorites.
The second row is now visible, so click on the word Likes or in the box.

When you can finally see your Likes box, click on it.

 

3. Once you see the page that reads ‘Favorites’ (mine says ‘Favourites’ because we’re in Canada), look up on the top right for the word Edit and click on it.

Photo of Favourites Page
Click the word Edit.

 

4. For each section of your Favorites, there is an icon that controls who sees it. Click the icon to set the privacy level of each Favorite. Standard Favorites are Music, Books, Movies and Television, etc. but you can always add other categories.

Photo of Facebook Likes Page 4
Set the privacy level for each category here.

You cannot hide some ‘Likes’ in each category and unhide others. If you like Madonna, that will be visible to all of your friends if you choose to make your Music ‘likes’ visible. To hide the fact that you like Madonna, you have to hide all of your Music ‘Likes’.

5. Finally, as far as ‘Page Likes’ go, you can hide them all or make them all visible to whoever you want. You cannot hide some pages and make others visible. Better to hide all of your page likes, just to avoid trouble. This is the way we’ve got our’s set:

Photo of Page Likes
Even though this icon controls the pages that you like, the heading is ‘Likes’. Confusing, isn’t it?

 

Very Important Tip (please read this): If the page you like is set to a category that you haven’t hidden, the fact that you like that page will be visible to whoever your settings allow. Let us explain that further. Let’s say that Madonna has her page set to be a ‘Music’ page or a ‘Movie’ page. Even though her Facebook page looks the same as our Facebook page (Computers Made Simple), the fact that you like it will show up in your ‘Favorite: Movie” box. Keep that in mind, please.

We’re going to update all of our other ‘Facebook Like’ pages to lead to this one. As of January 2013, this page is valid, at least in North America. Facebook may have different settings, depending on which country you are in at the present time. Europe seems to have better privacy guidelines, from what we’ve seen. Bravo to Europe for making Facebook tow the line!

If you have comments, problems or suggestions for topics, let us know. Thanks for reading!

 

While you’re here, why not add our Facebook page to your Likes? Here’s the link: Computers Made Simple on Facebook. 

 

Adjust Default Privacy Settings, Controlled sharing, Facebook, Facebook page likes, Hide Game Updates, Hide Likes from Timeline

Deleting Posts from your Facebook Timeline

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There are several ways to hide your page likes from showing up in your Facebook news feed or on your timeline. We’ve shown you how to hide individual likes in previous posts. This time, we want to show you how to hide groups of things from your timeline.

All of this is done from your own Facebook timeline so head there now.  Depending on your settings, you’ll probably see big boxes with titles such as Activity, Friends, Photos, Likes, etc. These big boxes match up with the little boxes with the same names, the ones just below and to the right of your name.

First, lets figure out what boxes we want to share with our friends. Click the small down arrow just to the right of the number of boxes you have in that section. This person has six. This is the box we are looking for:

Photo of Cleaning up your Facebook Timeline 1
Click the little box with the number in it. You can’t edit your Favorite boxes until you do.

 

Once you click on that box, you can edit and shift the various boxes around. Each main box on the second row has an editable icon on the top right, just hover your cursor there. Two boxes do not have edit icons: Friends and Photos. You can hide your full friend list elsewhere but clicking this box will show either your full friend list or mutual friends that you have with whoever is looking at your timeline. Your photo box can’t be hidden or changed but you can, of course, limit your audience to any photo that you post yourself. Any of the other boxes can be swapped with anything else or you can remove that box from your Favorites. (All of these boxes are named Favorites.) Here is a menu of what you can do with the boxes:

Photo of Cleaning up you Facebook Timeline 2
Arrange your boxes or remove a box completely. You can add it back later.

 

If you have removed a box from your Favorite boxes, you can add it back. Hover your cursor on the top right of any blank box on the top row and choose which box you want to add back. Here is the menu you see when you click the edit icon:

Photo of Cleaning up you Facebook Timeline 3
Pick a box name and add it back.

 

Just for fun, here is a glitch that we discovered in this section of the timeline. It looks like a menu where you can type in your own name but, unfortunately, it doesn’t work. This is what we saw:

Photo of Cleaning up you Facebook Timeline 4
It would be nice to make up your own name for a Favorite box, wouldn’t it?

Move down the page and find the post that shows that you’ve recently added a friend.  Click on the edit button on the top right of that box and you’ll get to hide that whole activity, not just the one single post.

Photo of Cleaning up you Facebook Timeline 5
Hide all friending activity  with the click of a mouse.

 

Facebook apps love to post every damn thing you do when you’re playing games. You can hide all posts by any game but, unfortunately, you have to do this game by game. Here’s one of the game menus which allows you to stop them from cluttering your timeline:

Photo of Cleaning up you Facebook Timeline 6
Remove all actions. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

 

Work your way down your own timeline and see what you can hide and what you can’t. Each time you do this sort of exercise, you will become more comfortable with maintaining your privacy on Facebook. By nature, Facebook is all about sharing but we think that you should be in control of what you share. We’ll help you all we can to figure it out.

 

Thanks for reading! Comments, questions, problems are all welcome. Follow us on Facebook to get the latest updates. Here the link:  Computers Made Simple 

Facebook, Facebook page likes, Hide Likes from Timeline

Hide Facebook Page Likes – A new twist

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Recently, a couple of our readers asked questions about hiding Facebook page likes. We’ve written about this before but we think we need to clarify this whole topic. You have to remember that we have readers from across the globe, many of whom may not be proficient in English. We’ve found it useful to explain things in several different ways, hoping that one explanation will finally make sense to a portion of our audience. Here we go:

1. We all know what a ‘page like’ is, right? If you go to a company’s page or a singer’s page on Facebook, you will see a large ‘Like’ button. It looks like this:

Photo of Like button
We’ve all seen it, right?

 

2. If you click that like button, you will receive updates from that page on your news feed. Unlike adding a friend, liking a page sets up a one-way communication link between the page and you, not between you and the page. Sure, you can comment on the page or on anything the page owner posts but they will not receive your updates or posts. It’s one-way only.

 

3. If you have hidden your page likes, as described here: Hide Page Likes, none of your friends will be able to see which pages you have clicked ‘like’ on. (There is an exception which we will describe below). If you’ve already hidden your page likes, this article isn’t for you…except for the glitch that we will explain later.

 

4. Let’s say you haven’t hidden your page likes but you don’t want to broadcast the fact that you like a page. Here’s how to do that. We’ll be using the Psych page as an example. This is what it looks like before you click the like button:

Photo of Psych Facebook Page
Facebook Psych Page

 

5. Click the Like button and you’ll see this menu pop down:

Photo of Facebook Like menu
Here is your chance to hide this particular like from your news feed.

 

6. Let’s uncheck the ‘Show in News Feed’:

Photo of News Feed Unselected
This page like will not show up on your news feed to your friends.

 

7. OK, here’s the explanation: If you’ve hidden your page likes, this won’t show up on your news feed or in your likes box. If you haven’t hidden your page likes but you unchecked the ‘Show in News Feed’ section, this won’t show up but it will be in your page likes section. Got it? There are some exceptions to all of this. Read on:

Facebook Page Like Glitch – this is the exception to the rule

Remember those like boxes, the ones on your timeline that have titles such as TV shows or Movies, etc? Believe it or not, some page likes fall into two categories. Take our Psych example. Yes, it is a Facebook page and, yes, we have liked it. Since our Page Likes are hidden, it would make sense that anything to do with our liking that Psych page would be hidden, wouldn’t it? Well, it isn’t.

Since that Psych page is a TV page, the fact that we liked it is visible in our Favorites under Television. Yes, the page like is hidden but the Psych page is still listed in our Likes/Favorites/Television section. Curious, right?

What should you do? We suggest that you completely hide all of your favorites. Maybe you don’t like a singing star’s music but you do like the photos on that person’s page. If you don’t hide your Music Favorites, that page will show up there. Any page that intersects with a favorite, could be music, TV, games, athletes, etc., will show up in two places on your Facebook Timeline page. If there is any question about whether you want your friends to know what pages/stars/movies/singers/sport/whatever you like, then hide them all.

 

Tip: Many employers use your Facebook profile to check you out before they hire you. Whether or not you agree with this, they do it. Let’s say you like the TV show ‘Breaking Bad’ or ‘Weeds’. Some conservative employers might just assume that you’re more interested in drugs than you should be, at least if you want to work with them. Do you see the ramifications here? Mull that over while you hide all of your likes.

Tip: Remember that you can hide any of your likes except photos and mutual friends. You can hide your friends but you can’t hide your mutual friends. Keep that in mind.

 

Thanks for reading. We’re going to to a whole post on that glitch, just to highlight it. Comments and questions are welcome!