A guide to privacy on Facebook

Privacy on Facebook

Privacy is built around a few key ideas: You should have control over what you share. It should be easy to find and connect with friends. Your privacy settings should be simple and easy to understand.

On Facebook, there are three basic levels of privacy: Friends, Friends of Friends, Everyone. You also have a set of public information, which helps your friends find and connect with you: your Name, Profile Picture, Gender, and any Connections you've made. This includes the friends, networks and Pages you've chosen to connect to. You also always have control over who can see your Connections on your profile.

Facebook's Privacy Policy

You can read our full Privacy Policy here.

How others see you

If you are ever curious about how your friends see your profile, or what information Everyone can see, use this tool to see how people see you.

Recommended settings

We offer recommendations for your privacy settings based on the three levels of privacy: Friends, Friends of Friends, and Everyone.

We recommend Everyone be able to see information that will make it easier for friends to find, identify and learn about you. This includes basic information like your About Me description and your Website, as well as the default setting for posts that you create, like photo albums and status updates.

Remember, any information that's visible to Everyone may be seen by everyone on the internet. It will be visible to anyone viewing your profile, and Facebook Platform applications and websites that you use will be able to access it. Additionally, it may be visible in search engines or through RSS feeds.

Some information is more personal, so we recommend Friends of Friends be able to see that type of info. This includes the settings for your Birthday, Religious and Political views, and Photos and Videos of Me, which is all the photos and videos you've been tagged in.

We recommend that your contact information, like mobile phone number and email address, only be visible to Friends.

Understanding your settings

The Privacy Settings page is organized into the following sections:

Personal Information and Posts covers personal details like your birthday and political views, along with your content and content others have posted to your Wall. You control who is able to see each type of information.

Contact Information covers contact details like your mailing address and phone number. We recommend you make this visible to friends only.

Friends, Tags and Connections covers information and content that's shared between you and others on Facebook. This includes relationships (shared between you and the person you're in the relationship with), interests, and photos you're tagged in. These settings let you control who sees this information on your actual profile. However, it may still be visible in other places unless you remove it from your profile itself. For example, people will be able to see that you're connected to a Page if they're on the Page itself, and your relationships to other people may appear on the profiles of those people.

Application and Websites covers what information is available to the applications you and your friends use.

Search lets you control whether a public search listing is created for you. You can also control who can see your information in Facebook search.

Block List allows you to identify specific people who you want to prevent from interacting with you on Facebook.

Protecting your privacy

We are committed to protecting minors who use Facebook. Until their eighteenth birthday, minors will have their information limited to Friends of Friends and Networks.