Facebook shows this week is not careful enough with the data of its users. What can you do to keep using Facebook, but share as little personal information as possible? We give five practical tips.
Five useful Facebook privacy tips
Facebook is having a bad week. Now it appears that the social network was careless with the private data of users, online complaints are raining and the hashtag #deletefacebook has been trending on Twitter for days.
Deleting your entire Facebook account is an option, of course, but there will be many people who would rather not give up all of their photos, messages, and friends list. In that case, you can considerably limit the options of the network by revoking powers. This can be done in the following ways.
1. Turn off location settings
When you install Facebook, the app will ask for access to your location data. You probably said ‘yes’ to this, but this is one of the most privacy-sensitive decisions. This allows Facebook and all third-party apps you have linked to know where you are, where you live, work and which restaurants you eat out at. Valuable information for advertisers, who can tailor their advertisements to this. If you regret this now, you can revoke this access. You do this as follows.
- Open the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad;
- Tap on ‘Privacy’;
- Choose ‘General’ and ‘Location services’;
- Tap Facebook, then choose ‘Never’.
2. Turn off third-party apps that you are not using
Your Facebook account has probably been around for years, and during that time you’ve used the social network to log into all kinds of third-party apps and services. As long as these apps have access, they will remain active, even if you are not using them yourself. A potential privacy threat, because with some apps you do not know exactly what they do with that data.
So we recommend that you scrutinize this list of apps and delete all apps that you no longer use or don’t trust. You do this as follows.
- Open Facebook on your Mac or PC;
- Click on the arrow at the top right and choose ‘Settings’;
- Click on ‘Apps’ in the menu on the left side of the screen;
- Choose ‘View all’ for a complete list.
Here you can then delete or change access to your Facebook data per app. For example, leave the apps you still use, such as AirBNB, but delete old games or apps that you haven’t opened for years.
3. Restrict sharing settings
Facebook was made for sharing things, but which data do you disclose and which not? You can manually adjust these settings down to the smallest detail. In this menu you can, for example, prevent strangers from accessing your profile. You open this menu as follows.
- Open Facebook on your Mac or PC;
- Click on the arrow at the top right next to the question mark and choose ‘Settings’;
- Click on ‘Privacy’ in the column on the left;
- Also see ‘Timeline’ and Tagging ‘for more privacy options.
You can then set per institution whether the info is public and who can send friend requests, view tagged messages and more. For example, by setting that search engines outside of Facebook are not allowed to refer to your profile and your messages can only be seen by friends, your account will be less public in one fell swoop.
If you want to go a step further, we recommend that you set all settings to ‘Friends only’. You can then continue to use Facebook, but only share the info with people from whom you have accepted a friend request. This also applies to the ‘Timeline and Tagging’ part of the Settings.
4. Delete unnecessary personal info and do the privacy check
Facebook has built-in privacy controls that make it easy to limit what information you share. Here you can indicate whether messages are public. You open it as follows:
- Open Facebook and click on the question mark in the top right corner;
- Choose Privacy Control and go through the three steps;
- In the last window, select ‘More information’.
This screen contains all the information that you share with Facebook. Here you can indicate where you live, where you work, which training you have followed and whether you have a relationship. Maybe you used to enjoy sharing this data, but now you look at it differently. Review this information critically and adjust it where necessary.
5. Review and adjust the advertising rules
Facebook sells your information so that advertisers can better tailor advertisements to your interests, place of residence and other factors. Fortunately, you also have something to say about this yourself, although Facebook has hidden this option well. You can find it via this link.
In this screen you can disable advertisements from analyzing your internet and app usage. This window also contains a list of all pages that you have liked, and you can indicate per page whether this data may be used for advertisements. It may take some time to adjust these settings, but it ultimately ensures that Facebook knows less than before.
Read more about Facebook
- Facebook scandals: an overview of the biggest controversies (7-4)
- Remove or deactivate Facebook: this is how you do it (7-4)
- This way you check whether you are part of the major Facebook data breach (6-4)
- Facebook is working on a wristband for operating smart glasses (19-3)
- These iPhone apps are the most harmful to your privacy (17-3)