Have you ever wondered what a stranger can see when they look up your Facebook profile? By default, Facebook sets several profile metrics and assets to public. This guide walked you through auditing your public footprint.
1. Inspect Your Profile Avatar & Cover Image
Your primary profile picture and cover photo are always public. You cannot make them completely private, but you can restrict who can view their historical likes, comments, and description metadata by editing the individual image visibility settings.
2. Manage Your Follower List Visibility
Who can see the people, Pages, and lists you follow? Navigate to your Facebook Settings under Privacy and adjust “Who can see the people, Pages and lists you follow” to “Friends” or “Only me”. This prevents public scraper engines from mapping your connections.
3. Control Who Can Look You Up
Facebook allows users to find you using your phone number or email address. To restrict this, set “Who can look you up using the email address you provided?” and the equivalent phone setting to “Friends” or “Only me”.
4. Disable Search Engine Indexing
If you do not want search engines like Google or Bing linking directly to your profile, turn off the setting: “Do you want search engines outside of Facebook to link to your profile?”. Please note that changes may take a few days to propagate across external index databases.