Thankfully, there’s some level control you can have on Facebook, and despite Facebook’s somewhat shady stance on privacy and the sharing of your personal information, you can at least limit your profile to your direct friends, work colleagues or acquaintances. Read next: What is Facebook Privacy Basics.
Restrict what friends can see on Facebook: Use a restricted list
If you’ve already added people on Facebook that you want to limit, you can add them to a restricted list. A restricted list in the words of Facebook “Friends who can only see posts and profile info you make public”. This means if you don’t share or post things with a public setting, people on this list won’t be able to see what you’ve been up to. Most people don’t know of this hidden-list, but it can be found in the ‘Friends’ menu on the left hand-side of your Facebook news feed.
Once you’re in the ‘Restricted’ section of Facebook, you can add friends to this list. It’s extremely simple, just hit the ‘Add Friends to List’ and start typing the name of your friend you wish to restrict. Don’t worry your friends won’t be notified of your decision of adding them to your restricted list, however it might be pretty obvious to them that they’ve been added to the restricted list as they will be able to tell that there’s only a few posts on your Facebook. As a side note, by default you should have posts shared with your friends only and ensure that your privacy settings are correctly configured, which you can access by hitting the small lock button at the top right hand-corner of your Facebook. Read next: How to keep your kids safe online.
Restrict what friends can see on Facebook: Privacy settings
If you don’t wish to add your friend to a restricted list, there’s also a way to limit posts to certain people. If you head over to your privacy options, you’ll be able to click a ‘See More Settings’ which will present you with a whole host of different privacy settings.
The one that might be of interest to you here is the ‘Who can see my stuff?’ option, which you can create a custom list of people to limit when they try to view your future posts. Additionally, you can limit particular posts from certain friends by clicking on what you’ve shared and just like the Privacy settings page, add an undefined number of friends in a ‘Don’t share with’ list. If you wish to see how your timeline looks to your friends whom you’ve restricted or limited, you can easily do so by going to your profile and clicking on the three little dots on the right hand-side. This will present you with the option to ‘View As…’ The default view is as the Public, but at the top of your timeline you’ll see ‘View as Specific Person’, with this you can type the name of the friend(s) who you’ve restricted. Read next: How to make Facebook private.
