How to Lock Down Your Facebook Security and Privacy Settings

I'll be honest with you,

the best way to keep your privacy intact on Facebook

is to delete your account.

But that's crazy talk.

Without Facebook you'd never find out

which of your high school friends went on to embrace

fringe political views,

or see sponsored ads for clothing companies

you've never heard of.

Not an option.

Instead, here are a few simple steps you can take

to make sure you're sharing what you want

with who you want, including advertisers.

Alright, let's start with the easy part:

limiting who can see which of your posts.

If you're on a desktop,

and it's probably easier to do there,

go to the little dropdown arrow

in the upper right-hand corner and click settings.

From there, click on privacy' on the left-hand side.

And get comfy, because you're gonna spend

a little time here.

Under who can see my stuff,

the who can see your future posts' option

lets you manage your defaults,

that means you can set it to whoever you want.

Public means anyone at all,

you can limit it to your friends,

you can limit it to all your friends except

for Jerry and Pam, because screw those guys.

You can quarantine your posts by geography,

or by current or previous employers or schools or groups.

It's very granular.

Use it.

Just remember that the next time you change those settings,

that group becomes your default for every post from then on.

So, double-check every time you go ahead

and send something out there.

This section has other important privacy tools

you can fiddle with, including who can look you up

with your email address, your phone number.

Just to be safe, go ahead and say no one.

But pay special attention to the option to

limit the audience for posts you shared

with friends of friends, or public.

I know that's a mouthful, but basically what it means

is if you used to have a public account,

but then thought better of it, great.

Good move, smart.

But you also need to lock this setting down to make sure

that those old public posts become private now.

That doesn't happen retroactively.

Once you've taken care of that,

head over to Timeline and Tagging.

This gives you some control over what shows up

in your Facebook timeline.

Basically, you can't stop your friends from tagging you,

and they're going to because friends are terrible,

but you can stop those embarrassing photos

from popping up on your page.

At the very least, you should go to Review posts

you're tagged in before the post appears on your timeline.

Enable that.

To test out your changes,

go to review what other people see on your timeline.

You can even see how specific people view your page,

like say your ex, not that you're hung up on them

or anything at all, of course.

That should just about cover your friends.

Now on to advertisers, which are like friends,

except they never leave you alone even if you ask nicely.

In that same settings panel, head down to Ads.

Now, as you've probably already guessed,

Facebook knows what you do pretty much everywhere online.

So does Google, so do dozens of

ad networks you've never heard of.

Thanks, Internet.

You can still limit how Facebook

uses that information though.

If you go ahead and turn off,

ads based on my use of websites and apps,

that lawnmower you looked at on Amazon

won't follow you over to Facebook.

Say no to, ads on apps and websites

off the Facebook Companies.

It does the same, except for all the sites

Facebook serves ads to around the web.

Lastly, for some fun insight into how advertisers

really think of you, click on your interests.

There you'll find all the categories Facebook uses

to tailor ads for you.

You can remove any you don't like,

and marvel at the ones that don't make any sense.

Apparently, I'm into backpacks.

I had no idea.

And you're good.

At least, as good as can be expected.

It's still Facebook after all.