We’ve been confronted by a problem this week, a problem that we could duplicate but not solve. One of our readers commented that she was unable to unhide her June like box on Facebook. To get to the root of this problem, we deleted the June box in one of our profiles on Facebook. Lo and behold it’s gone, forever it seems. If we find a way to get it back, you’ll be the first to know. Here’s how we got rid of the box:
1. Head to your timeline and find the box you want to delete. In this case, our June Like box is the target.
This was our June Like box before we deleted it. No edit button shows at this point.
2. Hover your cursor (mouse) over the top right corner of the box to bring up the edit button giving you a choice of editing or removing the box:
Hovering your cursor over the top right corner brings up this Edit button.
3. Click on the icon to bring this menu up:
The choices for this box are to simply hide it from the timeline.
4. You would think that if you can hide the box from the timeline, you’d be able to unhide it, right? Well, we can’t. We also hid another box and lost it too. If you don’t refresh your page, you can undo the hide but once you refresh the page, it’s gone forever…we think.
It’s gone! We’re looking for it. If we find it, we’ll let you know.
5. Once we refreshed the page, not only were the two likes gone, the whole damn box was gone!
Facebook is chock full of mysteries and confusion sometimes, isn’t it? But it’s fun to try and unravel these mysteries. We often wonder if the people who created this mess will ever be able to simplify it or, perhaps, they don’t want to. The more confusing the interface is, the less chance that someone will be able to dodge Facebook’s ads and their various invasions of our privacy. The less people hide, the more money Facebook makes, right? You might want to think about that before you dive into it.
We’ve been writing about Facebook privacy for quite a while now. There seem to be an incredible array of privacy settings, right? If you’d like to do your own experiments, and we suggest that you should, here’s what to do: Set up a second Facebook profile.
1. Instead of logging into Facebook, apply for a new account. Fill in your details on the page that comes up when you log out of your current account or simply go to Facebook.com in another browser. You could use your real identity, such as your second name and the same last name, or a fake one, it won’t matter to Facebook, even though their terms say you have to be a ‘real person’. You must use a real email address but that’s easy, sign up for a new hotmail or gmail account and you’re off.
2. Add yourself as a friend. That’s your first step. Forget about photos or personal details for now. Add your other account as a friend (in a separate browser), and get to work. Keeping both profiles open in separate browsers will show you instantly how changing the settings on your new profile affects what updates you send out to your other, original profile.
3. On the new account, go around liking things, posting crazy pics with different privacy settings and so on. On your normal account, check to see what is shown from your alter ego’s activities. What you’re looking for, obviously, is how you can hide what your fake account does from your real account. If your fake account can hide things, then your real account can hide things as well.
4. Make a note of anything you do. We find ourselves lost in the thick of Facebook privacy pages sometimes and, quite frankly, we forget how we got there. Part of this is deliberate. We have to describe how to get to a certain page to our readers so it has to be kind of second nature to us. Getting lost lets us experiment with our reader’s experience. If we explain something and we get lost, then sure as shootin’ our readers will too.
5. You can use the second account to subscribe to pages and websites that you wouldn’t normally subscribe to, knowing that your privacy is guaranteed. For some of you who have very eclectic tastes, this might be the answer to the whole Facebook privacy problem. Instead of trying to decipher Facebook’s arcane privacy settings, simply start a new account and get on with exploring the alternate lifestyle you want to hide from your family and/or your friends.
6. Another benefit of a new account comes with the different Facebook games you play. If you need shots of energy in Mafia Wars, send them from your new account. There are quite a few games that require neighbors in order to advance. Adding yourself as a neighbor opens up more doors in games such as Farmville or Hidden Chronicles.
Adding a new Facebook account and experimenting with it is simple, free and probably takes a lot less time than trying to remember which setting is which, at least as far as privacy is concerned. It also takes less time than reading posts such as we have here on Computers Made Simple but we hope you still come back to visit us now and then.
There are things you can hide on Facebook and things you can’t. Let’s start with the short list.
Things you can’t hide on Facebook
Comments and likes on anything that you haven’t posted. If you comment or like someone’s photo, you can’t hide it, you can only delete the comment or ‘unlike’ the photo. Same thing for a status update, a note or a page that you’ve liked. You can hide the fact that you like the page but you can’t hide your comments. Therefore:
Facebook Rule Number One: If you don’t want someone to see a like or a comment, don’t comment on or like a photo, status or comment that wasn’t posted by you.
Things you can hide on Facebook
You can hide virtually everything else, except what you see above. Feel free to subscribe, click like on fan pages, post photos and notes (making sure you set your privacy rules accordingly). If there are some subscriptions or fan pages that you want to hide, you can do that. We’ll show you how.
For everything you post on Facebook, there is an icon just to the right which allows you to set the rules for who can see the post. The only one that needs explanation is the Custom choice. If you click that, you can hide the post from some of your friends. Just start typing their name in the slot and select them one by one.
Here are some tips on how to hide your page likes and subscriptions:
1. Click on your profile photo on the top right to get to your timeline,
2. Click on the words Update Info.
3. Here’s what you’ll see:
Select the things you want to update using the drop down menu on the upper left.
4. The items in the drop down menu might be different than the ones you see here. On one of our accounts, we’ve lost the ‘likes’ completely. The one you are looking for here is probably ‘subscriptions’ or ‘likes’. Clicking on Likes brings up a page which lists all of your likes. Move your mouse over to the top right until the word Edit appears, like this:
The edit button is a mouseover, it only appears when the mouse hovers over the spot where it is.
5. Click on the word Edit when it appears and this page will show up next:
Use the icons on the right to hide your different likes.
6. As you can see, the top list of Favorites are locked, only available to the owner of the profile. The rest are open to friends only. The current page is for your ‘favorites’, the general interest things such as movies and TV and so on. Scroll down this page to get to your actual Facebook page likes and your website/web page likes to see this:
Scroll down the page to see this selection, subs will vary, of course.
7. This is where your selection of page likes will show up. Here you will see the Facebook pages you have clicked like on plus all of the websites or web pages that you’ve also liked. As you can see in the example above, all of this person’s like are locked, only the owner can see them. Any page this person clicks like on will be hidden from everyone. Remember that.
Tip: Before you go around clicking like on questionable pages, click like on a generic page. Once you’ve done that, head over to the page above and hide that like from everyone, or just from some/one of your friends. Anything you like after that will be hidden, according to your current settings.
Finally, here is the key to hiding what pages you like, whether they be Facebook pages or web sites or pages beyond Facebook:
Use this menu to select who can see your likes on Facebook.
It is that little menu at the top. Use it wisely and you’ll be able to safely click like on anything BUT posts or shares by other people.
Facebook is fun but sometimes you like to keep some of your activities hidden from your friends. We hope this little guide helps you out.
It’s fun to share things on Facebook but it’s also prudent sometimes to hide things from your friends and family. If you absolutely love Justin Bieber, Rihanna or even Snoop Dog, maybe you don’t want to share these things with co-workers, friends or family. But you still want to keep up on what these singers are up to, just as you want to get updates on TV shows, movies, etc. We’re sure you can see why you might want to hide your entertainment likes from your Facebook timeline.
TIP: Your entertainment likes and interests are all open by default. The fact that you liked a TV show or a movie, for example, may be past history or you might add a singer to your like list. As soon as you do that, your action will show up on your timeline as well as the newsfeed and the ticker. The time to hide anything like that is before you signify that you like it. Got it?
Here’s how to get to the area you want:
Click the arrow to the right of the word Home on the top right. Choose Account Settings. On the left, look for the words: “You can also visit your privacy settings or edit your timeline to control who sees the info there”. Click ‘your timeline’ to bring up the next page. Close the Basic Info box that is open by default, then look up by your name for the word ‘About’ and the little arrow to the right of it. Click the arrow and choose ‘Likes’.
All of your default Facebook likes, such as Books, Movies, TV shows, Etc. are there. Now, some of these might be OK to have on your timeline/profile. Here is where you get to choose who sees what.
Click the word ‘Edit’ up on the top right. A list of topics follows and beside each topic is a share icon. Here you can choose what to hide from whom or what to hide from everyone. Settings are: Public, Friends, Only me (you), Custom and so on. Custom is the one you would choose if you want to hide the fact that you like Justin Beiber from your daughter, for example, but not all of your other friends. Make sure you click ‘Done Editing’ when you are finished.
These like lists were part of the original Facebook, long before you could simply like a page. They describe you to other people, sure, but maybe you don’t want everyone to know you like the Yankees if you live in Boston.
In our last post we described how to hide page likes from your timeline and you might want to go back to that article here: Hide Page Likes from your Timeline.
Thanks for reading!
Tip: You cannot hide photo likes or comments or the fact that you liked a comment or note or album on Facebook. Your only choice is to ‘unlike’ or delete your comment. Pretty much everything else is able to be hidden. Read our past posts to find out how.
Once you’ve set up your new Facebook account, it’s time to decide what face you want to present to the world. Do you want an old photo of yourself so that your high school friends can find you? Do you want a recent photo so your friends at work will recognize you? How about a family pic from a few years ago? Now is the time to decide who you will interact with on Facebook. Your profile photo will be visible to everyone, if you have your privacy settings set up that way, or it will only be available to friends, again depending on your settings. We will get to those later.
In the new Facebook, you actually have two profile photos. One is thumbnail size and the other is larger. Think of the larger one as a background image, something that illustrates your interests or your hobbies, maybe scenery that you love. You don’t really want your ‘Cover’ photo to be too personal. Keep it pretty but impersonal.
Your profile pic can be anything you want, but if you are young or female, you might not want to put a knockout profile photo up. There are stalkers who troll Facebook for attractive women. A generic photo that is only available to your friends makes a lot of sense unless you are trying to simply meet people. In that case, you’re on your own.
Once you have your photos set up, it’s time to look for friends. You can search them out yourself or you can send them an email with the link to your Facebook account in it. Sound difficult? Well, if you know your friend’s email address, Facebook will send them an email which includes a link to your profile. Quick as a wink, your friend is added. There are many ways to add people but you can rest assured that Facebook takes care of it all. You can search for old friends at school or work or even in your own neighbourhood. All of these search choices are available from your profile page. Just click on the Find Friends link on the top right side. Here is what you want to see:
There are lots of choices here to look for friends on Facebook.
While we would prefer you to email your friends using the Facebook system described above, you can also sign into each of the listed social networking applications and send messages to your friends that way. Why don’t we advise that? Simply, trusting your account password to a third party, even if it is Facebook, seems risky to us. If you decide to go this route, make sure you change your password immediately afterward.
Once you start to add friends, you can start to interact with them. For now, type a light-hearted message in the ‘What’s on your mind’ box on the main page of Facebook. In this box you can also share a link or a photo or video or just ask a question. To share a link, simply copy the link from the top of your browser window and paste it into the box. Facebook finds the site, gives a short description of it that is visible to your friends and then chooses a small photo from the site. Sometimes you can choose which photo to use, sometimes it’s only a single choice. Then, at the top of the box, say something about the link. Then click Post and you’ve officially shared something on Facebook. Pat yourself on the back!
Next time, we’ll get into privacy settings. With Facebook, you get to choose who sees your stuff. More on that next time.
Thanks for reading!
a little bit of hi-tech, a little bit of common sense and a lot of fun
