Facebook Timeline Privacy Tips: Lockdown Your Profile

Facebook Timeline puts all your information conveniently on display -- here's how to fix that.

By Sarah Jacobsson Purewal

January 31, 2012 — PC World — Facebook's Timeline is coming, whether you like it or not, to Facebook accounts everywhere - including yours. I've been using Timeline for about a month now, and I'm not sure how I feel about it.

On the one hand, it's a lot easier to find things -- events, wall posts, etc, because you can now search your Facebook profile by date. On the other hand, it's much easier for other people--friends, strangers, you name it -- to find things, because they can now search your Facebook profile by date.

Timeline Tell-all

As it turns out, I've posted a lot of things -- not all of which are totally tame and/or work-appropriate -- over the past eight years that I've had Facebook. And now they're all neatly categorized by date.

While it's true that you could technically see these posts before the introduction of Timeline, you would have had to do a lot more work. For example, in order to see my posts from 2006, you would have had to go to my Facebook profile, wait for the 20 or so most recent posts to load, and then click "Older posts" about...500 times. Honestly, if someone really wanted to see my posts from 2006 that badly, more power to them.

But now they can just see those posts by going to the right side of my profile and hitting 2006 -- and then choosing the month they want to see posts from. This convenient access to my info is little unnerving, in my opinion.

So here's how to fix that.

Make Your Timeline Private

The first step to Facebook privacy is making your profile, or Timeline, private. To do this, go to Privacy Settings > How You Connect and change the settings for "Who can post on your timeline?" and "Who can see posts by others on your timeline?" from "Public" to "Friends."

Go to Privacy Settings > How Tags Work and change the settings for "Maximum Timeline Visibility" from "Public" to "Friends."

If you're super-intense, you can change those settings to "Custom" and choose "Only Me" -- then you'll be the only one who can see the posts.

Finally, limit your past posts -- which may have been made public at the time -- to Friends only. To do this, go to "Limit the Audience for Past Posts" and click "Manage Past Post Visibility," then "Limit Old Posts." This will change all past posts to Friends-only, even if you initially made them public.