How To Keep Your Facebook Account Safe & Secure

How to give your Facebook Privacy a quick checkup

As you probably know, Facebook’s default privacy settings are pretty weak, making virtually everything you post and do on Facebook viewable by the public.

There are a number of settings you can tweak to lock down the privacy of your account and protect your photos and private info (at least somewhat), but tracking down all of those settings can be a chore if you just go down the list of settings on the Settings screen.

Luckily, there’s a very simple way to view (and if need be, change) virtually all of the most important privacy settings in one location using Facebook’s ‘Privacy Checkup’ tool. Just follow the steps below for the device you’re using.

If you use Facebook in a web browser on a laptop or desktop computer:

1 – Click your tiny profile picture avatar in the top-right corner of the Facebook window.

2 – Click Settings & privacy.

3 – Click Privacy Checkup.

4 – You should now see a series of boxes on the screen, each containing a link to one of the primary categories of privacy-related settings.

Click on each box in turn to follow a simple wizard for viewing (and changing if necessary) the settings that fall under that category.

If you use the Facebook app on a mobile device:

1 – Tap your tiny profile picture avatar in the top-right corner of the screen.

2 – Tap Settings & privacy.

3 – Tap Privacy shortcuts.

4 – Tap Take a privacy checkup.

5 – You should now see a series of boxes on the screen, each containing a link to one of the primary categories of privacy-related settings.

Tap on each box in turn to follow a simple wizard for viewing (and changing if necessary) the settings that fall under that category.

Facebook Account Cloning

In case you’re unfamiliar with account cloning, it’s where a scammer creates a completely new Facebook account in your name and populates it with photos and personal information they’ve copied from your real account.

They then use the new fake account to send friend requests to all the people on your real account’s friends list.

And since it appears to the friends receiving the friend requests that they were sent by you, some of them will accept it. This of course results in those friends now also being “friends” with the fake account that was created by the scammer.

The important setting to avoid this is to change “Who can see your friend list?” to “Only Me”

Now that your friends list is private there’s very little risk that it will ever get cloned by a scammer.

Note: The setting you just changed won’t hide your list of mutual friends from someone you are already friends with. However, most scammers who clone Facebook accounts are strangers, not someone who is on your Friends list.

Thanks to Rick’s Daily Tips for this information!