Your Facebook Page Can Appear in Search Results

Facebook has made yet another change that will affect how private your Facebook page is. A new change will allow anyone who uses Facebook to find your page simply by typing your name into the Facebook search bar. Now is a good time to manually change the privacy settings on your posts.

Michael Richter, Chief Privacy Officer for Facebook posted more information about this privacy change on the Facebook Newsroom blog. Facebook will be removing an old setting that had the clunky name of “Who can look up your Timeline by name?” very soon. The decision to remove it was announced a year ago, but the removal did not happen until now.

He had a few suggestions about how to control what people see on your Facebook page. You are able to change the privacy setting of each, individual, post. Change the setting to Friends instead of Friends of Friends or Public. This can be done for old posts and new ones.

You can use your Activity Log to review what you have already shared. This allows you to easily find things that you would like to delete. Somewhere in there is the option to untag photos and to change the privacy settings of past photos.

The other suggestion is somewhat out of your control. You can ask your Facebook Friends to delete or remove things that are on their pages that you are involved in. Hopefully, your Friends will decide to respect your request.

It is also possible to go into “Privacy Settings and Tools” and limit who can see what is already on your Facebook page. Look for the setting called “Limit the audience for posts you’ve shared with friends of friends or public”. Michael Richter says this will allow you to limit all of those posts to only Friends “with one click”.

For a while, Facebook will put up a notice that reminds users that “sharing with public” means that anyone can see the post you are about to make. There is one exception. According to CNET, your Timeline will not be visible to the people whom you have blocked on Facebook.