Facebook Privacy Settings using lists

With the number of ever increasing friend invites and adds that you may get from Facebook users, I am sure that at some point you would want to have some rules about who may or may not see a photo or information about you. For this reason, you can use Facebook’s privacy settings.

Sometimes, you may get too many friend requests for example, even from people who you don’t know or those you have met but never get the chance to know them really well. Let’s regard your friends on Facebook in terms of level of friendship. Make categories of friends such as unknown or strangers, acquaintance, friends and close friends. By categorizing them, it would be much easier for you to filter out what information about you that those categories can access.

In this post’s example, we look into how you can restrict your friends by filtering out who you decide to have access to your photos or profile information. This can work for your status updates as well. Categorizing by making lists is what you need and once done will save you plenty of time to organize your 1000 Facebook friends. Here’s what you can do:

Creating a List

1. From the Facebook menu that you see at the top of the screen, click on “Friends”.
2. You should see a long list spanning over pages of your friends. Look for the “Make a New List” button on the left of the screen. Key in a name for the new list. You can start off with “Unknown” or “Strangers” for the people you have no idea of who they are on your “all friends” list.
3. Once you clicked on “Make a New List” and named the new list, you should see the “Add to List” option as shown in the screen capture below.



4. Click on “Select Multiple Friends” so you can choose and add who among your friends to be listed in the new list that you just created. You should see tabs displaying all friends, all selected or all unselected. Don’t forget to save the new list once you’re done.
5. Repeat steps 2 through 4 for all the list or category you could think of – stranger, acquaintance, friends and close friends and so on. If you want to be more specific, you can create listings based on where you meet your friends such as college name or work place or even from an event that you attended a week ago.

Note: You can also delete a list that you have created or send messages to the list you currently chose. Look for the options at the bottom of the page.

Making use of the lists you created

The list that you create can be used for privacy settings that apply to albums or profile information for instance. If you are about to accept a friend request, look for an option to add the user into the list that you have already created.

Let’s look at how you can use the list to filter out who have access to your photos. In this example, we create a new album and set the privacy settings right away.

1. Create a new photo album and fill out the album name, location and description as you wish. On the “Privacy” option, select “Customize…”



2. You should see the following window. Choose “Some Friends” and click on the small green “+” symbol to display the lists that you have created earlier. Remember to click “Okay” to save changes you made.



3. Upload your photos. Your photos will be visible to only some friends if you use the above settings. Without lists, you have to add one by one of your friends to enforce privacy. Create and use lists if you have 20 or more Facebook friends.

Note: You can also set the privacy settings with albums that you have already created. Just look for the “privacy settings” option on your album.

In conclusion, using lists would be beneficial if you have a considerably huge list of Facebook friends. If you have already created lists, you will save some time as you add or approve new friend requests. The lists can also be used for privacy settings related to status updates, personal information, education and work related information and so forth.