Footprint · guide
How to make your Facebook profile private, setting by setting
By Alberto Gulotta · Updated · 18 min read
How to make your Facebook profile private is a series of settings rather than one switch: Settings & privacy › Settings › Audience and visibility for posts and lookups, the About section for each field, and Privacy Checkup for the guided pass. Six things stay public whatever you choose.
There is no one switch, and the page that explains why sits elsewhere
Instagram has a single control that makes an account private. Facebook does not have its equivalent, and the document that explains why is a help page called Public information on Facebook — which is not the page you land on when you go looking for the setting.
The part with nothing behind it is called the Public Profile. In Facebook’s words it “includes your name, gender, username and user ID (account number), profile picture, and cover photo”, and the reason given is that Facebook uses it “to help connect you with friends and family”. Three more fields are public in the same way: “your age range, language and country”. There is no audience selector next to any of them.
Two details in that list do more work than they look. Your username and user ID are in the address of your profile, so the address itself carries them. And a second Facebook page describing the same Public Profile lists networks as well — school or workplace — which the first page does not. We have kept both lists rather than choosing the shorter one, because the difference is in the producer’s own documentation.
So the honest answer to the question is not a setting. It is a boundary: everything else can be narrowed, and this cannot.
| What | Facebook’s wording | Which page says it |
|---|---|---|
| The Public Profile | “your name, gender, username and user ID (account number), profile picture, and cover photo” | Public information on Facebook |
| The same list, plus one | “your name, profile picture, cover photo, gender, username, user ID (account number), and networks” | Control who can see what’s on your profile |
| Three profile fields | “your age range, language and country” | Public information on Facebook |
| Your address bar | “Username and user ID (example: your account number) are in the URL of your profile” | Public information on Facebook |
| Anything with no selector | “If you share something and you don’t see an audience selector or another privacy setting, that information is also public” | Public information on Facebook |
The rule that decides everything else, including the things you never set
One sentence in that same page governs the whole account, and it is the most useful line Facebook publishes on this subject: “If you share something and you don’t see an audience selector or another privacy setting, that information is also public.”
Read it as a test rather than a warning. When you are about to post, look for the selector. If it is there, the audience is whatever it says. If it is not there, the answer is already public and there is nothing further to adjust. That covers the cases people are surprised by later: comments on public posts, which Facebook states “are also public”, and anything posted in a public group or on a Page, where “posts and comments … are public” and “may appear in Feed and other places on or off Facebook”.
Facebook also lists where public information travels, and it is further than “anyone can see it”: it can “show up when someone does a search on Facebook or on another search engine”, and be “accessible to anyone who uses our APIs, such as our Graph API”. That is why this page does not stop at the settings screen.
The route, and the guided version that covers more of it
The direct route. Click your profile picture in the top right, select Settings & privacy, then Settings; in the left column scroll to Audience and visibility and open each option in turn. Posts, stories, who can look you up, your friends list: each is set separately, which is precise and easy to leave half finished.
The About section is a different door. Places you have lived, family and relationships, contact details: click About below your cover photo, then Options next to the entry, then Edit, and use the audience selector beside it. These are per-field, and they are not reached from Audience and visibility.
The guided route is Privacy Checkup, from the same Settings & privacy menu, and it is the only place several of these settings appear together. Facebook names its five sections: “Who can see what you share”, “How to keep your account secure”, “How people can find you on Facebook”, “Your data settings on Facebook” and “Your ad preferences on Facebook”. The first covers past as well as future posts; the third decides who can look you up by phone number or email address; the fourth lists the apps and websites you have used Facebook to log into.
One condition applies before any of it: Facebook states that “you can only manage some Privacy Checkup settings from your main Facebook profile, which you created when you signed up”. If you use an additional profile, switch to the main one first or the checkup will quietly cover less than it appears to.
Then check the result rather than assuming it. Facebook’s View As tool shows the profile as other people see it, which is the only way to find the field you missed.
The half you do not control, and the two reviews that help
Facebook is direct about this: “Others can make your shared info public, even if you didn’t.” A friend’s public post about you is their setting, not yours, and no amount of tightening on your side changes it.
Two controls narrow the part that lands on your profile. Timeline review holds tagged photos, posts and app activity until you approve them; tag review does the same for tags. Facebook attaches the limit to the feature in the same breath, and it is the sentence worth keeping: “you can still be tagged, and the tagged content … is shared with the audience the person who posted it selected in other places on Facebook (example: Feed and search)”. The review keeps it off your profile. It does not unpublish it.
The UK data protection regulator puts the general case more bluntly than any platform will. “Once it’s out there, you will not be able to control what happens to it”, says the Information Commissioner’s Office, whose advice is not a one-time settings pass but a habit: “review your information regularly — what may have seemed like a good idea at the time may not seem such a good idea some months or years later”.
After the settings: the copy that is already in the search engine
Making the profile private governs what is served from now on. It does not reach into a search engine that has already indexed the old version, and that is a second job with its own tools.
Google is precise about what it can and cannot do. “Google can only remove things from Google Search results” — to change the source you go to the site that hosts it, which in this case is the settings you have just changed. A removal can also be partial rather than total: the page then “won’t show up on Google search results for any search query that contains your name or identifier”, and stays put for every other query.
Where the page has already been changed, the tool is a refresh rather than a removal, and Google’s own note keeps it honest: “If you’ve already updated a live page, you don’t have to fill out the form” — the crawler will get there. The form exists for when the search result still shows content that is gone, because “the page description or cache might be outdated”.
And the sentence to end on, from the same page, because it is the one that sets expectations correctly: “Even if Google removes something from Google Search, it might still be on the internet. People might still find it through links, social media, or other search engines.” Where that copy is held by an organisation rather than a person, a different route exists: the right to be forgotten is a legal request with deadlines, not a settings change.
Private, locked, deactivated, deleted — four different things
They are asked for interchangeably and they do not do the same job.
Where the facts on this page came from. Everything asserted above is quoted from three Facebook Help Centre pages, the Information Commissioner’s Office and Google Search Help, all read in full on 9 September 2026 and listed under Sources. The Facebook pages were read in English deliberately: from a European connection they are served translated, and a quotation taken from a translation cannot be checked against the original.
And the neighbouring questions. If the account itself was taken rather than merely visible, start at identity theft instead, the Instagram recovery route covers the other half of the same login, and recovering a Facebook password covers getting back in. If somebody is threatening to publish private photographs, the page on blackmail has the free removal routes and the deadline a platform is under. For what is public about you elsewhere, your digital footprint gathers the rest of it.
Where to start
Three ways in.
- “Where is the private switch?”
- There isn’t one — no switch
- “Just tell me the menus”
- The route, both doors — the route
- “I changed it and Google still shows it”
- The second job — already indexed
What else is public about you
The same question asked of the other places your name turns up.
Accounts, and closing them
When narrowing what is visible is not enough and the account itself has to go.
Questions people also ask
How do I switch my Facebook profile from public to private?
There is no single switch. The settings are applied one at a time under Settings & privacy › Settings › Audience and visibility, or in one guided pass through Privacy Checkup. Your name, profile picture, cover photo, gender, username and user ID stay public either way.
What can people see if my Facebook profile is private?
The Public Profile: name, gender, username, user ID, profile picture and cover photo, plus your age range, language and country. A second Facebook page adds networks to that list. Anything you posted without an audience selector is public too.
Does making my profile private remove it from Google?
No. Google states it “can only remove things from Google Search results” and that the source has to change first. Once the page has changed you usually need do nothing: “if you’ve already updated a live page, you don’t have to fill out the form”.
Can I make old posts private in one go?
Yes, and it is inside Privacy Checkup rather than the main settings list: the “Who can see what you share” section covers past posts as well as future ones, alongside who can see your phone number, email, birthday and relationship status.
Why can people still tag me after I change everything?
Timeline review and tag review hold tagged content off your profile until you approve it. Facebook is explicit that this is not the same as unpublishing: “you can still be tagged”, and the content stays visible to the audience the other person chose.
Is a private profile the same as a locked one?
No. Locking applies a bundle of settings at once and turns past public posts to Friends, and Facebook says the feature “isn’t available everywhere right now”. Making a profile private is the manual equivalent, and it works in every country.
Not covered here. It does not deactivate or delete the account: those are different outcomes with different consequences, and each has its own guide.
It is not about a Facebook Page. A Page is public by design, and the guide for one covers deleting it rather than hiding it.
And it does not recommend a paid removal service. The one such company in these results is named as what it is — a seller — and everything this page asserts comes from Facebook, the ICO or Google instead. What holds instead is simple: every setting path is quoted from the Facebook Help Centre pages read in English on 9 September 2026 rather than reconstructed from memory, the two different Public Profile lists are both reproduced instead of merged into the tidier one, the limits of a search-engine removal are in Google’s own words, and the one result on this question that sells a removal subscription is named as such.
Sources
- Facebook Help Centre — Public information on Facebook: the contents of the Public Profile, the age range, language and country fields, the rule that anything shared without an audience selector is public, that comments on public posts and posts in public groups or on Pages are public, and the list of places public information can travel to including other search engines and the Graph API — www.facebook.com, read 9 September 2026.
- Facebook Help Centre — Control who can see what’s on your Facebook profile: the Settings & privacy to Audience and visibility route, editing About entries with the audience selector, timeline review and its limit, the View As tool, and the Public Profile list that also includes networks — www.facebook.com, read 9 September 2026.
- Facebook Help Centre — Facebook Privacy Checkup: the five named sections and what each one covers, including past posts, who can look you up by phone number or email, and the apps and websites you have used Facebook to log into; and the condition that some of it can only be managed from your main profile — www.facebook.com, read 9 September 2026.
- Information Commissioner’s Office — Online safety: that once information is online you will not be able to control what happens to it, that privacy defaults differ between sites, and the advice to review your information regularly rather than treat it as a one-time settings pass. The ICO notes this guidance is under review following the Data (Use and Access) Act — ico.org.uk, read 9 September 2026.
- Google Search Help — Remove my private info from Google Search: that Google can only remove things from Google Search results, the difference between a full and a partial removal, and that content removed from Search may still be on the internet and findable through links, social media or other search engines — support.google.com, read 9 September 2026.
- Google Search Help — Refresh outdated content: that a search result can keep showing an outdated page description or cache after the page itself has changed, and that no form is needed when the live page has already been updated — support.google.com, read 9 September 2026.
Written by Alberto Gulotta
Founder and editor of AI Tools Primer, writing from Palermo, Italy. Thirty-five years of taking computers apart, starting with a Commodore 64 — the long version is on the about page.
Something wrong on this page? Write to aitoolsprimer@gmail.com and it gets fixed.
Written on 9 September 2026 · last checked 10 September 2026.
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