By default, anyone can look you up on Facebook via your email address or phone number. You can change your privacy settings to limit who’s able to search for you. Here’s how:
- Click the little “down” arrow at the top right of any Facebook page and choose Settings.
- Select Privacy on the left. Under the Who can look me up? section, you’ll see a setting for your email and a setting for your phone number.
- Use the dropdown menu next to each setting to select who can look you up using that info: the options are Friends, Friends of friends or Everyone.
Note: You can remove your mobile phone number altogether but note that if you do that it means Facebook can’t send you login approvals, which ensure that you don’t get locked out when using an unrecognized computer or mobile device to log in.
While you’re sorting out your Facebook settings, make sure you lock down your profile so only your friends can see your posts. That was actually our third advent tip – Set your Facebook posts to ‘Friends only’
You can also keep up to date on all the latest Facebook-related news by liking our page.
Images of Christmas tree and Advent calendar courtesy of Shutterstock.
Robert Persson
What is the benefit of this? It doesn’t seem obvious the way setting your Facebook posts to friends only is an obviously good idea. If someone really wants to find me on Facebook they just need to search on my name and the city I live in. I can’t see how disabling email and phone number searches would add any privacy.
Anna Brading
It depends whether you feel comfortable with anyone who knows your email address or phone number (such as cold callers or spammers) being able to easily match that up with your name and profile picture, and anything else you have set to be publicly viewable on Facebook. This article helps to illustrate why you might want to limit that type of information: https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2015/08/11/change-this-facebook-setting-so-you-cant-be-searched-for-by-phone-number/
herzco
One question. Assuming your privacy settings are set to friends only, how do you feel about Facebook profiles being indexed on search engines? (That is the last question on the list under settings > privacy)
herzco
I ask this because, while security is of utmost importance, I also am a freelancer so potential clients find people online.
Derbie
This doesn’t change people being able to search for others. There is not a way I can change it to where I am not able to be searched?
lydiaaboulian7461
Despite all my privacy settings being on either
‘Only me’ or ‘friends’ everyone has access to my whole profile. Is this a glitch in facebook??? I’ve also tried disabling my account altogether, yet my profile is still very visible and accessible to the public.
Someone please help!
A M Carter
There is no down arrow on any of my pages
Paul Ducklin
Down?
There’s supposed to be a left arrow and a right arrow at the bottom of every page except the first (right arrow only ) and last (leftarrow only). Are those present? If so, that’s as it should be.
If they aren’t working, you can naviagate to the individual articles by tweaking the URL (you can omit the date and the suffix)…
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/advent-tip-X
…where X ranges from 1 to 24 inclusive.
HtH!