The Facebook Blog

Around Thanksgiving, we posted a tip about creating friend lists to control access to your photos. Now that the holidays are in full swing, complete with office bashes, ugly sweater parties and New Years soirees, we thought we would take a minute to explain in more detail how you can control access to the content you post on Facebook.

When you post a photo album or video to your profile, you have the ability to decide exactly who can see it. You can restrict access to certain networks, your friends and their friends or just your friends. If... you're looking for even more granularity, you can choose the "customize" option and use friend lists to make the content available only to a subset of your friends. For example, if you don't want your co-workers to see that embarrassing photo of you wearing your grandmother's favorite holiday sweater, create a friend list for family members and make the photo available only to people on that list.



Be sure to check out exactly what your friends look at when they view your profile—just type their names into the box at the top of the profile Privacy Settings page.



You can also keep track of photos and videos that your friends have uploaded of you. If a friend has tagged you in a photo or video that you don't like, you can always remove the tag, which will make it harder to find.

Keep in mind that this won't remove the content completely, and we won't bail you out by deleting someone else's photo or video just because it's unflattering to you. If there's something you really don't want on Facebook, you should talk to your friend and ask them to remove it. As always, use discretion when posting your own content, and if you're considering posting something that could be damaging to you or your friends no matter who has access to it, don't.

Last week, Facebook was named by users as one of the most trusted companies for privacy in an annual survey conducted by a widely recognized privacy and information security research organization. We're really proud that you've validated the controls we've built, but we don't take that trust for granted and are always working to do better. If you have questions about privacy or suggestions for how Facebook can help you manage your information and connections better, please check out our Privacy page or contact us here.


Sasha, a Privacy Specialist in User Operations, is always around to help—even during the holidays.