Category Archives: Layered Privacy

Adjust Default Privacy Settings, Controlled sharing, Facebook, Facebook Secrets, Facebook Tricks, Hide Adding Friend, Layered Privacy

Hide Facebook Friend Activity

August 16, 2013 Computers Made Simple 1 Comment

For some of you, Facebook is all about who is on your friend list. That’s what it’s all about, right? We’ve shown you how to keep your friend list hidden completely or partially. Today we’re going to show you how to keep your ‘friending’ activity private.

Facebook’s privacy can be divided into two sections. The first is the things you have, such as friends, photos, likes, videos, notes, etc. The second section is the things you actually do while you’re on Facebook. All of the clicking, sharing, posting and so on are actions. Here’s how to hide one of those actions, we’ll call it ‘friending’. Friending is when you add a friend to your list, obviously. Can you think of a reason why that particular activity has to be public? Why should anyone know who you just added to your list? That’s your business, isn’t it?

Steps to Hide Your Friending Activity

1. Click on your name up on the top left of any Facebook Page. This will take you to your Timeline.

2. Once your Timeline comes up, click on Activity Log.

Photo of Facebook Hide Friending 1 — **Start with your Activity Log.**

3. The next page lists everything you’ve done lately. That’s not what we want. Look on the left middle for the word MORE. There are two but we want the top one, just under Comments. Click it.

Photo Facebook Hide Friending 2 — **Click More.**

4. On the longer list that opens, look for the word Friends. Click it.

Photo of Hide Facebook Friending 3 — **Click Friends to bring up the right page.**

5. This page shows your ‘friending’ activity, adding and subtracting friends. Look up on the top right for a new icon. We’re not sure what the icon represents but click it anyway.

Photo of Hide Facebook Friending 4 — **What do you think this icon represents?**

6. To hide your activity, uncheck everything that can be unchecked. One choice can’t be unchecked, simply because when you add a friend, you have to be able to see their profile. If that’s hidden, how would you know who your friends are?

Photo of Hide Facebook Friending 5 — **To hide everything you can, make sure your box looks like this.**

7. Your choices in this box will only take affect from this point on, it won’t hide your past activity. For that, go down the list and choose ‘Hidden from Timeline’ for anything that you might want to hide. As you know, or as you should know, Facebook has little warnings here and there about the stuff you try to hide. Here’s what they have to say about all of this:

Photo of Hide Facebook Friending 6 — **A reminder from Facebook. You can hide YOUR friend list but what if your friends don’t hide theirs?**

We hope we’ve given something to think about over the last two weeks. Even if you don’t agree with our suggestions on hiding everything, at least you’ll know how to help your kids, your parents, anyone who isn’t tech savvy enough to figure it out for themselves. Good luck on your journey to a more private Facebook experience.

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Adjust Default Privacy Settings, Controlled sharing, Facebook, Facebook Secrets, Layered Privacy

The Perfect Facebook Profile (Part 4) – What a secure profile looks like

August 15, 2013 Computers Made Simple Leave a comment

We can write all kinds of posts about what your Facebook profile should look like but we think it’s better to give you an example. We’ve set up a fictitious, but active, profile that we use as a test bed for our posts. Here’s the link to it:

Our Test Profile – Meet Jean Paul Clavicle

This is where we test our Facebook group settings, our timeline adjustments, etc. Just this morning we noticed that we can’t seem to hide the activity when we add a friend so there are still many parts of this privacy set-up to work out. In the meantime, click the link and see what you can find about this person. We think you’ll be surprised at how little information there is on that profile.

Not much information here. Check it out.

How did we lock everything down? We started by opening one of our Facebook profiles in a different browser. If you’re using Chrome, open your own profile in Firefox. It goes without saying, but we’ll say it anyway, that you have to have two different Facebook accounts open at the same time, right? If you don’t have two Facebook profiles, we think you should make one now. That way, you can check your privacy out while you look at one profile from your other profile. Don’t add yourself as a friend, OK?

Search for your real profile in your alternative one and hit refresh every time you make a change. Continue hiding things until your real profile is the same as the one in the link above. Everything is done from your Timeline so start there. Click the various edit icons and see what you can hide. We’ve given you lots of information over the past two weeks so use our site as a guide. Remember that you have to edit just about everything, including the apps that you’ve let into your account, as well as your friends, your lists of Likes, your photo albums and so on.

Think of it this way. Let’s say you apply for a job and, as more and more companies are doing these days, the HR people decide to check out your Facebook profile to snoop on you. Is there anything on your profile that could potentially embarrass you or prevent you from getting that job? If someone is your friend, that’s one thing. If someone is a complete stranger, do you really want them to see the album from your graduation party in Key West? Put future employers into the mix and we hope you’ll see why we’re concerned about your privacy. You should be too.

Photo of Shock Face — **Lock up your profile and this won’t happen to you. (Photo of ex-future boss.)**

Now is the time for you to ask us what things you want to hide? Our next post will explain how to hide your ‘friending’ activity. Just as no one should be able to see what friends you have, we don’t think they should be able to see when you add someone to your list. If you see something that we’ve missed, let us know in a comment below.

Thanks for reading! Facebook is always changing. Make sure you keep up to date with these changes by liking us on Facebook. Here is the link: Computers Made Simple on Facebook

Adjust Default Privacy Settings, Controlled sharing, Facebook, Layered Privacy

The Perfect Facebook Profile (Part 3) – Hide your friend list

August 14, 2013 Computers Made Simple 1 Comment

Day three of creating a totally private Facebook profile. By the end of this week, anyone who manages to find you on Facebook won’t be able to discover much about you, certainly no more than the bare minimum that Facebook says you have to reveal. Today, we’re going to lock up your friend list, at least as tight as you can. Remember that you cannot hide mutual friends that you have with someone.

Theory: Ask yourself why any of your friends need to know who else you are friends with. Think about it and then you can set your privacy accordingly. If you have friends that you don’t know very well, keep them from knowing who else you know. If you have guys who raid your list of friends for leads, you know what we mean, you can stymie them easily.

1. Short and sweet, head to your own Timeline by clicking on your name up on the top left.

Photo of Hide Friend List 1 — **Click on Friends to start the journey.**

2. Click on the word Friends.

3. Up on the top right, click on the pencil icon and choose ‘edit privacy’.

Photo of Hide Friend List 2 — **Click the pencil.**

Photo of Hide Friend List 3 — **Choose ‘Edit privacy’.**

4. In the box that opens, make your selections carefully. You can choose ‘Only me’ or any number of other options. If you’ve made a list of acquaintances, you can keep your friend list away from them, for instance.

Photo of Hide Friend List 4 — **Lots of choices here. Make your choice carefully.**

5. Ideally, this is what we’d like to see:

No one else really needs to see your friend list, do they? Why?

6. If you want some friends to see your list, you can tune your privacy in quite a few ways. Friends of friends? Specific people or lists?

Photo of Hide Friend List 6 — **It doesn’t have to be complicated. That’s why we prefer the ‘Only me’ setting.**

Finally, please remember that you can’t hide your mutual friends. Facebook does not allow that. We can see how that might be a problem for some teen users, but that’s the way it is.

Thanks for reading! Let us know if you have comments, problems, questions or suggestions. We’re very approachable. Like us on Facebook and you’ll get some good karma! Here’s the link: Computers Made Simple on Facebook.

Adjust Default Privacy Settings, Facebook, Facebook Photo Privacy Settings, Facebook Secrets, Facebook Tricks, Keep Safe Online, Layered Privacy, Security

Facebook Privacy Settings – Part 3 Profle Photo Trick

August 8, 2013 Computers Made Simple 1 Comment

Facebook week continues here on Computers Made Simple. In our last two posts we’ve shown you the ins and outs of posting something and setting the privacy limits for it, then we described the various photo albums and their limitations. Today we’re describing how to adjust privacy for your profile photo.

Profile Photo Trick – As we told you here: Facebook Photos and Albums , some Facebook albums have different privacy settings than others. One album that we are concerned about is the Profile Pictures album. Your profile photo is made up of two parts, the thumbnail and the main photo. Everyone can see the thumbnail, remember that. You choose who can see the full photo. Here’s how to have a profile pic that doesn’t reveal too much.

1. Before we begin, remember that when you upload a new profile photo, it is set to ‘Public’ by default. You have to change that setting to ‘Friends Only’. The thumbnail will remain public but the photo itself can be made private. We’ll show you how.

The first time you change your profile photo, Facebook tells you that the photo is Public…but you can change that.

2. Click on your profile photo up on the top left of any Facebook page. This brings up your Timeline. Next, hover your mouse on the photo and choose ‘Edit profile picture’.

Hover and choose Edit Profile Picture.

3. We strongly suggest that you choose ‘Upload Photo’ or ‘Take Photo’ (you can only use this if you have a webcam attached to your computer.) The reason we want you to use a new photo is that you can edit the thumbnail much better with a new pic. If you use one of your old profile photos, this trick doesn’t work quite the same way.

Upload Photo or Take photo, both will work for this.

4. Choose the photo you want to use. This is the one we chose for this post:

An ex-sports star with his fleet of cars. Note that you can see his face in this full profile pic.

5. Facebook uploads the photo. Initially, this is what we saw when we uploaded this photo:

His face is still visible. We’ll fix that.

6. Hover over the photo again and choose ‘Edit thumbnail’:

We want to Edit thumbnail.

7. When the Edit Thumbnail dialogue comes up, drag the photo around until you can’t see or can’t recognize the person (you) in the photo:

Drag the small image around until you can’t be seen. Do NOT choose Scale to Fit.

TIP: If you choose ‘Scale to Fit’, Facebook simply makes a very tiny copy of the full photo and uses that as the thumbnail. In some cases this might be fine but make sure the thumbnail doesn’t reveal too much.

8. OK, we’re almost done. The new photo is set to Public, right? We want to change that. Click on the thumbnail and the full photo comes up. On the right, there are two Edit buttons. Both do the same thing so it doesn’t matter which one you click.

Two edit buttons, choose either one.

9. We prefer to choose Friends for the privacy setting. That’s up to you but we don’t advise you to leave it set to Public.

Friends, right? Better than Public unless you’re trying to attract strangers.

Yes, there are quite a few steps to this but we think it’s worth it. If you’ve got kids who are on Facebook, share this trick with them. Unless they are desperately seeking friends who are complete strangers, maybe it’s better to hide their face. Are we taking this search for privacy a bit too far? We don’t think so. If you had any idea of what some people reveal to strangers, you’d probably agree with us. Click on some Facepiles and see what turns up. You’d be shocked.

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