4 Ways to Use Facebook Without Giving it Much of Your Personal Information

I'm not always all about using social media because of our personal info(s) are or can easily be seen by anyone who's interested in just to get acquainted and be friends. Some people have been victimized because of the people they met on Facebook, while some even lost their lives.

Now I am not saying that Facebook is one big evil corp or that Facebook as a social media platform is bad, but there are several things you can do on your own to stay safe while connecting to the people that matter to you. You can start by limiting the number of your personal info(s) you share on Facebook, and also apply some basic security settings such as.

#1.   Disable Location:

Facebook uses location services to tailor down its algorithm that suggests to you whom you might wanna connect with or you whom you might know. However, disabling your phone's inbuilt location won't be enough because Facebook will still be able to know your location based on your IP address from your ISP, but using a good VPN will fix that.

To disable location on iOS, head to your iPhone’s Settings app, scroll down to “Privacy” under the general tab, and tap Location Services. And to the same on Android, open your phone settings, you will see location under security and accounts management.

Location data is among the most sensitive data you can grant to a third-party app or service, and one the things that Facebook asks you once you install the app is to allow the app to access your location data.

#2.   Do Not Authorize Untrusted Third-Party Apps

It is very common for most Facebook users to allow several apps to have access to their account and such can or will from time to time post on their behalf. Some of these apps include enquizstar, horoscope, Picsart, or thisisyourdigitallife, and so on.

Now I am not against anyone using these apps or giving these apps access to their Facebook account, but you should be aware that there are (in some cases) something fishy about these third-party Facebook apps that access your profile and then posts on your behalf.

In the case of “thisisyourdigitallife,” which claimed it could predict aspects of a user’s personality, was created by Cambridge psychology professor Aleksandr Kogan. The app siphoned user data from up to 270,000 people who downloaded it and signed in through Facebook. 

The data included where these people lived, who their friends were, and it may have also informed election ad targeting for Trump’s presidential campaign after Kogan handed the data over to Strategic Communication Laboratories, violating Facebook’s TOS in the process.

To review the list of apps you have granted access to your Facebook account, log in to your Facebook account, head over to the “Apps section” via Facebook settings. (This is best done on a desktop, but you can do it on mobile as well.) At the top of the page, you’ll see the total number of apps you’re logged into using Facebook.

#3.   Limit Who Sees Your Posts and Pictures

This is one of the security and privacy customization settings I always like to use, though it might seem a little difficult to grasp at first, when you finally do, it is exciting. You get to choose who sees or likes or comments on whatever thing you post on Facebook.

Now, these settings seem to be the most complicated of Facebook’s privacy and security customization options, and it involves a lot of careful calibration and finesses to make sure you have a setup that works for you. So I will personally advise you do this on a desktop, where reviewing all this information at once on a larger display is easier than that of a smartphone screen.

Once you're logged into your Facebook account, click on the downward-facing triangle next to the question mark icon in the upper right corner of facebook.com. From there, find the “Settings” option at the bottom. From here, click on “Privacy” in the lefthand column.

From there you can see the privacy options that are available and then choose them according to your preferences. Several privacy options there to tweak includes

1.   Who can see your friends list

2.   How people can find and contact you on Facebook.

3.   You can edit settings for who can send you friends requests

4.   Whether people can find you using your email address or phone number

5.   Whether your profile shows up in search engines.

Generally, you can limit the amount of data you’ve provided as well as limiting the number of people that see them., to change everything to either “Only me,” “friends,” or “friends of friends” as a last resort. You can also disable search engines outside Facebook from linking to your profile, which is a smart move.

#4.   Remove Personal Infor and Restrict Ads Preferences

Most people go the extent of narrating their life story on the Facebook profile, I mean come on!! just a line or two details of yourself and a little personal contact info will do just fine. From the “About Me” section to limit the amount of total information you’re sharing with Facebook at all times To do so, click on that question mark icon in the upper right corner of the page and click on “Privacy Checkup.”

Go through the first step in this process until you to get step number two, where at the bottom you have the option to go to your About Page. From there, you can edit or delete all types of information you’ve shared on Facebook, from your work and education history to where you’ve lived to contact and basic info like email addresses and phone numbers.

After the privacy checkup is your ads preferences, head over to the Facebook's Ad Preferences page to remove the ability for advertisers to target ads based on your personal information. You can make it so advertisers cannot run ads informed by your relationship status or where you work, or any of the dozens of categories Facebook has automatically selected for you based on the information you’ve provided and what the company nebulously refers to as “other activity,” which ranges from classifications like “Gmail user” and “close friend of expats” to “frequent traveler.”

PLACE YOUR MID-POST ADS CODE HERE FOR pc