Protecting yourself on Facebook

 

Facebook has many advantages and disadvantages. One of the disadvantages of Facebook is that everyone gets to know stuff which you intend for a select audience. The "everyone" may include people who are outright enemies, friends who are enemies (frenemy) and people above you in the hierarchy ( you boss etc) who would love to use the data you publish for malicious or harmful intent. How would you go about shielding yourself in such cases. Here are some ways.

Got an oversharing Facebook buddy who can’t stop with the food photos, a sullen friend who’s bringing you down with all his depressing updates, or a frenemy who you don’t want peeking at your Facebook photo albums? Well, you could always hit the “unfriend” button, but doing so might seem a bit extreme—and hey, what if they find out?

Luckily, there are a few of ways to keep marginal Facebook pals at arm’s length without cutting them off altogether, starting with…

1. Add chatterboxes to your “Acquaintances” list

So, you added a long-lost friend you remember fondly from high school, but now they’re constantly peppering your news feed with random links about their favorite TV shows, silly cat photos, and endless snapshots of their kids. It’s not that you want to slam the door on all their updates, mind you—just, well, most of them. Want to see a little less of a friend in your news feed? Just add them to your Acquaintance list.

Here’s a quick, relatively painless solution: add your distant yet ever-chatty friend to your Acquaintances list.

Once you do, Facebook will automatically pare down the number of news feed updates you receive from them to a bare minimum. For example, you might still get notified that a far-flung Facebook acquaintance got married or landed a new job, but you’ll get sweet relief from the daily kitty snapshots.

Indeed, putting an oversharing friend on your Acquaintance list makes for the perfect way to dial down their endless updates without silencing them altogether. And don’t worry: your friend will never know that you relegated them to your Acquaintance list.

To add a friend to your Acquaintance list, just…

• Hover your mouse over their name on their timeline or in your news feed.
• When you see the pop-up window with their profile photo and a “Friends” button, hover your mouse over that button to reveal a new pop-up menu.
• See the “Acquaintances” option? Go ahead and click it.
• Want a little more control over which updates you’ll see from a specific friend? Instead of “Acquaintances,” click “Settings,” then start unchecking categories (from “Life Events” to “Comments and Likes”).

Oh, and one more thing: if you ever want to hide a post of your own from the folks on your Acquaintances list, you can choose the “Friends except Acquaintances” option from the audience selector (the pull-down menu that sits right next to the Post button).

2. Block downers from your news feed

Here’s another scenario: you have a pal who just won’t stop with the links to depressing news stories, the “I hate my job” updates, the bitter diatribes against the politician you voted for, and the off-color, not-so-funny jokes. It’s easy to block all of a friend’s updates from appearing in your news feed.

Now, maybe you’re not quite ready to ban your bummer of a buddy from the updates and photos you share with fellow Facebook friends. That said, here’s a pal whose name you’d rather not see in your news feed at all—not even if they got a promotion, had a kid, or managed to eke out a good day.

Well, guess what: you can completely block updates from that downer of a friend in just a few clicks:

• Again, hover your mouse over the friend’s name on their timeline or in your news feed, then wait for the window with their profile photo to appear.
• When it does, hover your mouse over the Friends button, click Settings, then uncheck “Show in News Feed.”
• Last but not least, enjoy the silence.

3. Banish a frenemy to your Restricted list

Say you added your conniving boss as a Facebook friend your first week on the job … and now you’re regretting it. You’re thinking twice about every photo upload and every update you post, but “unfriending” your boss isn’t really an option. What to do? Had enough of a certain Facebook frenemy? Banish them to your Restricted list.

Try this: put him on your “Restricted” list—a “friend list” for friends and frenemies who you’re this close to unfriending. Once you banish someone to your Restricted list, their links, photos and updates won’t appear in your news feed at all (although you might see their name pop up in the ticker once in a blue moon).

Even better, they’ll no longer see any of your updates, photos, or other Facebook activity—or at least, nothing that you haven’t flagged as “Public” in your privacy settings. In other words, putting a frenemy on your Restricted list is as close as you can get to unfriending someone without actually unfriending them.

Here’s how you do it:

• Once more, hover your mouse over their name in your news feed or on their timeline, wait for the pop-up window to appear, then click the Friends button.
• Select “Add to another list” from the menu, scroll all the way down, then click Restricted.

Note: While Facebook won’t notify a friend that you’ve put them on your Restricted list, an eagle-eyed frenemy may well notice that they’re not seeing your “friends only” updates anymore.

Bonus tip

Want to see a list of all the friends whose posts are blocked from your news feed?

• First, go to your news feed, hover your mouse over the News Feed link in the top-left corner of the page, click the little pencil icon, then click Edit Settings.
• A pop-up window should appear, complete with the names of all the friends whose updates no longer appear in your news feed.
• Change your mind on any of them? Click the little “X” next to their name.