Tag Archives: Hide Facebook likes

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, Facebook, Facebook 101, Facebook page likes, Facebook Secrets, Facebook Tricks

Facebook Changes Its Like Privacy – get the details here.

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As of November 7, 2012, Facebook has completely changed its privacy settings for pages that you like. Pages include artists pages, tech pages, etc. Here is what we’ve found so far:

1. Your activity log is one place to start. Get to this page by clicking on Activity Log from your Facebook timeline. The first page that comes up is your own posts and posts from whatever apps (games) you have used recently. What’s new here is the Start Tour button. That should clue you in to the fact that something has changed.

Photo of Facebook Likes 1
Click on your Activity Log under your cover photo on your timeline.

 

2. Click on the Start Tour button and this pops up. The settings described here affect only the things that you have posted. 

Photo of Facebook Likes 2
This is the ‘friends only’ icon.

 

 

3. Once you click Okay, another message pops up. This one is key to the new Facebook privacy…or lack of it. It’s worth emphasizing, we think: Hidden posts may appear in other places on Facebook.  It seems now that there is no privacy on Facebook at all, right?

Photo of Facebook Likes 3
Read these words carefully. ‘Hidden posts may appear in other places on Facebook.’

 

4. Click Okay once this has settled in. The next box says that you can sort out your activities by clicking on the box up at the top.

Photo of Facebook Likes 4
Sort through your activities by clicking on the box near the top.

 

5. Here is the list of your possible activities.  Finally, your Likes appear.

Photo of Facebook Likes 5
Click on Likes.

 

6. The page that comes up when you click Likes isn’t your page likes. These are your photo likes and comment likes. Nothing has changed with these likes. The photo below shows that this user, Emily Cheng, has set her photos to ‘Public’.  Anyone who gets to her profile can see her photos, not a setting we would recommend.

Photo of Facebook Likes 6
Don’t set your photos to Public, that’s our advice.

Remember that the settings shown here are completely out of your control. We think that this is shown in order to warn you about who can see that you liked the photo. In this case, it’s possible that everyone on Facebook could potentially see that you liked it, not just this person’s friends.

 

7. Next, we want to show you what your options are when you like someone’s photo. There is only one. The first, shown below, seems to suggest that you can keep this like from your timeline.

Photo of Facebook Likes 7
If it’s ‘Allowed on Timeline’, you’d think there was a ‘Not allowed on Timeline’ choice. There isn’t.

 

8. The only thing you can do to hide your like from your timeline is to, you guessed it, ‘unlike’ the photo. That is the only choice you have.  When you click the circle to the right, this is what you see:

Photo of Facebook Likes 8
Unlike is the only choice you have to keep this like off of your Timeline.

 

9. When it comes to liking a page, you have one more option.

Photo of Facebook Likes 14
You can hide this like from your Timeline.

Hiding this like from your timeline may or may not keep it hidden from your friends. Let’s head over to another area of Facebook to see if we can keep this ‘like’ away from your news feed.

 

10. On the same page that you are on now, your Activity Log, look up on the top left. You’ll see this:

Photo of Facebook Likes 15
Click on the words Activity log, then on Likes.

11. Once you click the word Likes, this page will pop up. It looks like you can’t do anything here but hover your mouse up on the top right. You’ll see the word Edit appear.

Photo of Facebook Likes 12
Hover your cursor on the top right and Edit will appear. Click it.

 

12. This next page is quite empty and it looks as if there is no way to edit anything. Hover your cursor over the name of any like here and this is the menu that pops up:

Photo of Facebook Likes 13
Here are your choices for these Likes.

 

13. Three choices are available. Show in News Feed, unchecked Show in News Feed meaning ‘not Show in News Feed’, and Unlike. You can also create a new list. More on that next time.

That’s it. Once you have unchecked the ‘Show in News Feed’ box, make sure that you click Done Editing to save your changes.

 

OK, so far so good right? Well, not really. We suspect that this whole thing is in a state of flux. As you saw before, Facebook is telling you that things you hide may be visible elsewhere on Facebook. That kind of sums up our feelings about all of this hiding from your news feed or timeline. These items may or may not be hidden at all. Yesterday, for example, we played around with hiding the fact that we liked the Mashable site. Even though it was a hidden activity, hidden from our timeline and hidden from our news feed, there it was in plain sight when we checked from another profile on two different browsers, even after we refreshed the page again and again. Nothing was hidden. Today, it isn’t there but yesterday it was. Go figure!

We love to hear from you. Keep your comments and suggestions coming. If you have problems, let us know. We’re here to help.

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

Facebook, Facebook 101, Facebook Tricks, Hide Likes from Timeline, Privacy, Timeline

Hiding Things on Facebook

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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:

The first page for updating your information.
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:

Mouseover shown to edit "likes"
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:

List of Editable Likes
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:

Lower half of Facebook Likes page.
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.
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.

Thanks for reading!