How to protect your privacy with Facebook timeline

From the launch page and activation of the timeline ( link ) little to nothing is said on the subject of privacy, only a few words: ” Control who can view your content : Only people with whom you shared a post in your home can see it in your timeline. You can go back and change who can view a post, delete or hide it from the timeline. “It’s not explained how to check who is viewing what, how to limit the display of post to only friends, and how to avoid that anybody can see and find out everything we interact with or we do on Facebook.

So in this post we believe it’s important to explain how to protect your privacy with the timeline, and understand the basic settings required and how to set them to keep you safe.

The timeline will in fact be a mandatory change for all users and there will be no turning back and we’ll all need to get used to the new profile, but it is very important to look at your privacy settings.

Privacy with the timeline

Once activated the timeline gives your 7 days to configure it, then it will be published automatically.

The first consequence of the timeline publishing is that it gives access to all of your friends that you have added on Facebook from the day you signed up. That’s right … your profile is in fact turned into an open book easy to browse, everyone will have access to everything from your first status update till today.

And many of these posts will be public, that is open to everyone, even those who are not your friend! So the first change you need to know is how to set the visibility for your old post. To restrict the public for your old post you just go to privacy settings ( link ), click “Manage Past Post Visibility” popup and click “Limit Old Posts.”

Then click on Done when you are asked if you are unsure of proceeding. Now only your friends can see your old content published from when you first signed up on Facebook not the greater public.

Then it is important to choose the privacy level of your content that you post on your profile. This level of privacy is the default, or what will be used by default to all posts on Facebook, for every story and you can then decide whether to change the settings or leave everything as is.

Always choose your default settings to a secure level of privacy, we recommend that you set to Friends or click Custom and set as friends or include friend lists, in other words, who can see what.

Last control option is to know how to select privacy settings for each post, or to choose whether to hide or delete from your timeline profile. To do this, go on your timeline and find content already published and click on the two controls, a pencil and a star. The star is used to resize the news in your timeline, or to make it important and highly visible, and the pencil gives you access to post settings: you can choose to hide the update from the timeline, delete the post, add or change the date and place of publication (the position).

These checks are very important in order to protect your privacy and avoid all the information we post on Facebook being accessible to everyone on Facebook.

Share this article with your friends, and help them to protect your privacy!