Fixing Some of Facebook's New Privacy Settings
Facebook recently launched new privacy settings, and with that launch came some headache for those serious about their Facebook integrity.
For instance, if you post to your wall and you've set your wall posts visibility to friends only, that still means:
- Friends of friends can view, comment and like your check-ins.
- Frends of friends can view all your likes (both Facebook fan pages and liked links).
- Friends of friends can view your subscriptions.
Regarding the check-in visibility, it's hard to do something about. Even though you've set check-in visibility to friends only, that still means friends + friends of friends. That's just how check-ins work right now.
However, you can do something about your fully visible likes and subscriptions. You can hide them, but at a cost - you'll hide them for everybody instead. Including yourself and your friends. Plus you'll hide all future likes and subscriptions for everybody.
Anyway, here's how you limit likes and subscriptions visibility to friends of friends:
To hide likes, go to your Facebook page, find any like, click the X button that appears in the right corner and choose "Hide all recent likes activity from my profile":
To hide subscriptions, go to your Facebook page, find any subscription, click the X button and choose "Hide all revcent subscription activity from my profile".
If you want to remove those settings in the future, do it by scrolling down the news feed on your Facebook page and click on Edit Options in the bottom right area. Then you get this popup where you can do the changes you want:
Of course, you can use the Manage Past Post Visibility feature in Privacy Settings (arrow in top right corner) to hide previous public posts, but that only takes you so far.
Also, Facebook privacy settings doesn't include public group's comments you've made. Those comments will appear in your news feed anyway.
But until Facebook fixes this privacy issue, this is how to do it if you want to hide your wall posts from the public.
And, the ultimate question - how far are you willing to go in trusting all friends of your friends on Facebook?