If you’re worried about spamming your friends with game updates on Facebok, here’s how to hide them:
1. You can do this in at least two places. The easiest way to hide ALL of your game updates is to head to your Timeline first. Click on your name, top right side of any Facebook page. Once your Timeline opens, look for the words Activity Log.
From your Timeline, click on the words Activity Log.
2. When your Activity Log opens, all of your activities are shown.
All of your activities are shown here.
3. While you could scroll down and edit each post, we’re here to hide only your game updates. On the left of your screen, look for the list of activities. Normally, Games will be hidden so look for the word ‘More’ and click it:
Look for the word More and click it.
4. Once the menu spreads down, look for the word Games. Click on it.
Click on Games. All updates from all games that you play will show up on the right.
5. On the right side, click on the icon that is second from the right. If could be an icon of a globe, two heads in silhouette or maybe a padlock. Here are your choices:
Choose who sees each game’s updates. In this case, only the Facebook user can see this game’s updates.
6. Once you have set each game’s updates to Only Me, and that is the setting that we recommend, the icon on the far right will be greyed out. Why? Because ALL updates will now be hidden. Do your friends a favor by making sure that each game you play will not spam their newsfeed.
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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:
Most things that you’ve done are shown on your Activity Log, available from your Timeline.
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.
On your Timeline, you can find the edit icon up on the top right of most boxes.
You can check on story types that you have hidden. Seems we haven’t hidden any…yet.
Here, we’ve hidden three types of activity.
Click the arrow to open up all the boxes in your Favourites. Only then can you edit them.
You can swap positions or remove the box from your Favorites.
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.
See? Now the Places or Maps box can be edited.
You can check what posts you’ve hidden by looking at your Activity Log and choosing the correct link on the left.
Here is the full list of activities that you can check by clicking More down near the bottom (shown as Less here).
Hide all of your game posts here. Click the Stop Publishing Activity. Please do this for your friends!
Hide all Friending activity here.
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.
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Facebook has had many privacy glitches in the past. We’ve just discovered another one, a fairly significant privacy breach that allows a new user to stalk a friend’s friends. If you want to find out who is friends with one of your friends, even if their friend list is set to be seen by only the user, here’s what you have to do:
1. Sign out of Facebook first, of course, then open a new account. We just did this and found that if we tried to sign up using Firefox, we needed a phone number to register for Facebook. Using Explorer, we didn’t. While we don’t generally recommend using Explorer, it seems that it’s easier for this particular stealth operation.
2. Knowing that you are going to add one particular ‘friend’, try to use a name for your new profile that would seem attractive to that friend. Could be a sports star, could be a movie star, doesn’t matter. The key is to get that friend to accept you as a friend.
3. Once you have the profile set up and have confirmed the registration email, invite your friend to be friends with you. This plan gets confusing if you have more than one friend but it’s up to you how you handle it. You can always add a few friends then delete them but we’re not sure this works.
4. We all know that Facebook is all about adding people as friends, they even suggest names for you. If you are a new user, guess who they use as suggestions? Right, people from your one and only friend. Once your friend confirms you as a friend, Facebook immediately suggests that you add every single friend that this person has, even if their friend list is set to the ‘only me’ privacy lock.
Sometimes Facebook lists the friend as a ‘mutual friend’ with the person you are already friends with, other times they simply show the friend as a suggestion. The cool or uncool thing is, every one of that group of suggestions is a friend of your real friend. You can see how this would get confusing if you add a few people at once. Right now it works perfectly.
Here’s how Facebook suggests friends:
To see the full list, click on See All.
In order to see the full list, click on ‘See All’ to bring up page after page of suggestions, depending on how many friends your single friend has. This is the full list:
Here they are, all of your friend’s friends.
There you have it. Another glitch in Facebook’s privacy settings, all ready to be used and abused by savvy Facebook users. We can’t believe that this simple trick works, but it does. Imagine how this Facebook exploit could be used? Next to facepiles, we see this as the second biggest threat to your privacy on Facebook. We’re outlining it here just in case Facebook hears about it and changes their policy. Who would dream that their locked down friend list could be wide open like this?
Facebook recently changed the way that you can check who can see what you’re posted or been tagged in. Here’s a run-down of how you can quickly check your settings.
1. Start by clicking on the icon that looks like a padlock, up on the right of any Facebook page.
Click the padlock.
2. On the menu that pops down, click on ‘Who can see my stuff’.
Click on ‘Who can see my stuff?’
3. As the menu above spreads down a bit, click on ‘Use Activity Log’.
Click on ‘Use Activity Log’.
4. On the page that opens, everything that is possible to do on Facebook is on the left, everything that you can control is on the right.
Sort out your different activities from this single page.
5. The first time you access these areas, Facebook will walk you through the changes. Basically, this is a complete list of everything that you’ve done on Facebook since time began…well, since you joined Facebook anyway. Depending on how busy you’ve been, the different pages may take a long time to load. Choose an activity on the left side, then look on the right side to see who can see it. You can even choose activities that are set to ‘only me’.
The default setting doesn’t include ‘Only Me’ activity but you can set it to include it.
6. On this page, you can hide activity from your own Timeline. Remember that any post’s privacy settings are controlled by the original poster’s settings. You control your own posts, of course, but if you are tagged by someone else, you have the option of removing that activity from your timeline or removing the tag completely.
You can hide posts that you’re been tagged in.
7. Once you get used to finding and using this page, we think you’ll appreciate its power. Each post, each activity has it’s own settings. You can hide things from your Timeline, limit the audience for things you post or share, all kinds of things. Don’t forget that you can set an audience for a post/comment/photo when you do it but you can always backtrack and change the settings here.
Play around with this page. If you find something cool, let us know. We think you’ll feel a bit better about controlling your own privacy now.
When any social media ‘comes of age’, there are certain to be scammers who want to take advantage of the people who use it. Facebook has been around for a long time, we all know that, and there are hundreds of scams out there which are set up to trick you out of information and/or your password(s). Here’s how to spot some of them:
1. The most important thing to remember is this: If it’s sounds too good to be true, it probably is. No one is offering anything for free. You can’t get a free iPhone, a free Walmart gift card or any other thing by clicking on a link on Facebook. Use your head! Has Walmart or Apple ever given anything away for free? Don’t fall for any free gift links, any free vacation links or anything that even resembles this. Nothing is free, certainly not anything that you find on Facebook.
2. If you take a link that leads you outside of Facebook, you’re on your own. While you are in Facebook, certain secure conditions exist. If you click on a link that takes you out of Facebook, specially one that asks you for your Facebook password or your email password, close the browser window and move on.
3. If you get an email that looks like it’s from Facebook, it almost certainly isn’t. First, Facebook knows your name and would use it in any email that they might send you. Second, your privacy settings can be set so that Facebook can only contact you via your mobile phone or another email account besides the one you log in with. If your account has been hacked, there are ways to know this. Again, use your head. Don’t randomly click on links that you get in emails.
4. There are two sites that you can use to check things out. OK, three, if you count this site.
Snopes.com is where you can check out urban legends, rumors and myths of all kinds. If you’ve seen photos of ‘sick children’ on Facebook, Snopes will tell you how long that particular scam has been around. Bookmark this site and use it to check out things that seem suspicious on Facebook.
Use Snopes to check out scams, myths and rumors.
Thatsnonsense.com (here is their Facebook page: That’sNonsense.com) is something that we discovered when we were checking out a Facebook scam.
Check out Facebook scams here.
You have to wade through many posts but there is lots of info here about all current Facebook spoofs. The latest is this one:
Quoted from a post on Facebook:
Hello, my FB friends: I want to stay PRIVATELY connected with you. I post photos of my family that I don’t want strangers to have access to!!! However, with the recent changes in FB, the “public” can now see activities in ANY wall. This happens when our friend hits “like” or “comment” ~ automatically, their friends would see our posts too. Unfortunately, we can not change this setting by ourselves …because Facebook has configured it this way. PLEASE place your mouse over my name above (DO NOT CLICK), a window will appear, now move the mouse on “FRIENDS” (also without clicking), then down to “Settings”, click here and a list will appear. REMOVE the CHECK on “COMMENTS & LIKE” and also “PHOTOS”. By doing this, my activity among my friends and family will no longer become public. Now, copy and paste this on your wall. Once I see this posted on your page I will do the same. Thanx
End of quote.
This paragraph is being spread all over Facebook. As you know, if you have followed us for a while, this doesn’t work. The only way you can limit posts and comments is to control your privacy settings NOT by adjusting a friend’s news feed. How would you know this? Most likely because your friend, unless they are a computer expert and a pretty good writer, would not be able to write something like this. Second, if you uncheck photos and comments, how would you be able to see those photos and comments anyway? The person who posts this obviously doesn’t know how to set their privacy controls. We do! Follow our posts and we’ll keep you up to date on all everything to do with Facebook, scams, spam and phishing. We try to simplify your life as much as we can.
If you have questions about something that you see on Facebook, let us know. We’ll track down the answer for you.
Thanks for reading!
a little bit of hi-tech, a little bit of common sense and a lot of fun
