How to Make Your Facebook Account Private

To make your Facebook account more private, open Settings & privacy → Settings → Audience and visibility. Set future posts to Friends, review older posts, restrict who can find and contact you, and check what strangers can still see with View As.

Facebook does not have one universal switch that hides everything. Your name and some profile information remain public, which is also why Facebook cannot be used with an anonymous account, while posts, stories, contact details, and discovery settings have separate controls. The steps below are for a personal profile; settings may differ for other profile types.

1. Open your Facebook privacy settings

1. On a computer: Click your profile picture at the top right, then select Settings & privacy and Settings.
2. On iPhone or Android: Open the Facebook app’s Menu, then Settings & privacy and Settings. The Menu button’s location can vary with the layout.
3. Find Audience and visibility and open the setting you want to change.

The current route uses Audience and visibility, rather than an old standalone Privacy page. Meta’s privacy settings instructions list the available sections.

For a guided review on the desktop website, open Settings & privacy → Privacy Checkup. Choose Who can see what you share and review the information and audiences it shows. Some Checkup settings require your main profile, so switch to that profile if necessary. See Meta’s Privacy Checkup guide.

2. Restrict future posts

1. Under Audience and visibility, open Posts.
2. Select Who can see your future posts?
3. Choose Friends for ordinary sharing with your friends, or a more restrictive audience that fits the post.
4. Click Done if that confirmation appears.

This sets the default for future posts; it does not rewrite the audience of posts you already published. Meta documents the default-audience control here.

Check the audience underneath your name when composing a post. You can override it for that particular post with the audience selector. For example, set a personal update to Friends and a private reminder to Only Me, without assuming the reminder changed your future default.

Stories and reels have separate audience controls. Open their sections under Audience and visibility and review them too. A Friends default for ordinary posts does not replace those checks. Meta’s post-audience guide explains these distinctions and warns that tagging can expand an audience.

3. Review past posts before limiting them

For an individual old post, open your profile, find the post, and select the audience icon beside its date or time. Choose the audience you want.

For a broader change, open Settings → Posts → Limit who can see past posts → Limit Past Posts, then read the confirmation before applying it. The bulk action changes older posts shared more broadly than Friends to Friends.

There is no single-click undo for the bulk change. To restore different audiences afterward, edit the posts individually. Existing custom audiences are not changed by this tool, tagged people can still affect the audience, and it does not change somebody else’s posts. Meta describes these limits in its past-post privacy instructions.

4. Limit discovery, friend requests, and your friends list

Open Audience and visibility → How people find and contact you. Check each control separately rather than trying to set every option to the same audience.

• Who can send you friend requests? Choose Friends of Friends if you want to narrow requests. This control offers Everyone or Friends of Friends, not Only Me.
• Who can see your friends list? Choose Only Me if you want to hide your full list on your own profile. Other profiles can still reveal a friendship, and visitors may see mutual friends. See Meta’s friends-list guidance.
• People with your email address / People with your phone number: Open View beside each setting and choose No one if you do not want that contact detail used to suggest your profile. These are suggestion controls, not a guarantee that nobody can find you by name or through other information. Meta explains email and phone-based suggestions.
• Search engines outside Facebook: If the external-search linking setting is available, turn it off to restrict that linking. Existing search results can take time to update; this does not erase every public mention of you elsewhere.

Meta’s privacy troubleshooting page documents the friend-request choices and cached-search limitation.

For the complete procedure, our Facebook friends-list privacy guide shows the desktop and app steps, how to verify the saved audience, and why mutual friends may still be visible.

5. Review contact information and tagging

On your desktop profile, open About → Contact and Basic Info. Use the audience selector beside each contact detail to choose who can see it. Hiding a phone number from your profile is separate from restricting suggestions based on that number.

Then open Settings → Profile and tagging. Enable Review posts you’re tagged in before the post appears on your profile? if you want to approve their appearance there.

That review setting controls your profile, not the original post’s audience. The same tagged post can still appear in Feed, search, or other places. Meta’s profile-review instructions explain the limit.

6. Check the public view and profile-lock option

On the desktop website, go to your profile, select its options button below your name, and choose View As. Look over what people who aren’t your friends can see. Select Exit View As in the banner when finished. Meta documents this public-view check.

If Lock Profile is available in your country, you can also apply Facebook’s bundled profile restrictions. Our Facebook profile-lock guide explains how to enable it, what it changes, and what to do when the option is missing.

Limit Sharing by Restricting a Post’s Audience

Facebook does not offer one universal switch that prevents every kind of sharing. For an ordinary post on your own profile, open its audience control beside the date or time and choose Friends, Friends except, or Only Me, as appropriate. Only Me keeps that post visible to you. Meta’s post-audience instructions explain how to change an individual post.

Use the future-post default in step 2 for new posts and Limit Past Posts in step 3 for older ones. These controls limit who sees a post, but they can’t stop someone who can see it from taking a screenshot or copying it. Friends except only leaves the selected people out of the audience.

Stories, reels, Page posts, and group posts have their own audience controls, so check them separately. Then use View As (step 6) to see your public profile.

Frequently asked questions

Can I make my current profile picture completely private?

Your current profile picture and cover photo are normally public. You can adjust privacy for photos previously used in those roles. Where profile locking is available, non-friends receive a limited view, including restrictions on full-resolution photos. See Meta’s profile-photo explanation.

Will these settings hide my comments in public groups?

No. Public group and Page posts and comments remain public according to their context. Your profile-post default does not make those contributions private. Meta’s public-information guide explains what others can see.

Can I change my mind later?

Yes. Open any setting again and pick a different audience. The one exception is Limit Past Posts: to undo it, you have to change each post’s audience individually.