Facebook has become one of the most popular social media platforms in the world, with over 2.8 billion monthly active users as of Q4 2020. While Facebook offers the ability to connect with friends and family across distances, share life updates, photos, videos, and more, there are also risks associated with having a public Facebook profile.
Here we will explore some of the key reasons why you may want to keep your Facebook profile private and limit who can see your information:
Protect Your Personal Information
Facebook profiles can contain a wealth of personal information – your name, birthday, current city, workplace, relationship status, contact information, photos, posts about your interests and activities, and more. This information can potentially be viewed by anyone on the internet if your profile is public. Keeping your profile private ensures that your personal details are not readily available to strangers, protecting your privacy and safety.
Avoid Identity Theft
Identity thieves can use information shared publicly on Facebook to impersonate you or steal your identity. Details like your birthday, past addresses, mother’s maiden name, and more can help scammers answer common security questions to access your other online accounts. Keeping this info private makes stealing your identity more difficult.
Prevent Harassment or Stalking
An open Facebook profile can expose you to harassment, unwanted contact, or even stalking by strangers looking to target you. This is especially risky for teens and young adults. A private profile helps guard against this predatory behavior by controlling access to your personal info.
Manage Your Online Reputation
Anything you post on a public Facebook page becomes part of your digital footprint and public persona. Open profiles allow anyone to view your posts, photos, interactions, and more without context. This can impact how people perceive you, including potential employers, college admissions officers, or even dates.
Avoid Damaging Your Reputation
Careless posts, inappropriate photos, or controversial opinions shared publicly on Facebook can easily damage your reputation. Even old posts from your teen years could come back to haunt you later in life. Keeping your profile private limits this exposure and protects your reputation.
Maintain Your Professional Image
Employers and colleagues may look up job candidates on Facebook to evaluate their character and professionalism. Publicly visible political rants, compromising photos, or rude interactions do not make a good impression. A private profile lets you control what these important contacts can see.
Reduce Risks to Job Security
Facebook activity can potentially affect your job security in certain industries when profiles are public. This is especially true for teachers, government employees, lawyers, police, doctors and other regulated professions. Private settings allow you to reduce this professional risk.
Avoid Violating Codes of Conduct
Teachers, government workers and other public service roles often have codes of conduct restricting social media use. Inappropriate posts or photos made visible publicly have gotten people fired. Keep your profile private to avoid inadvertently violating employer policies.
Prevent Conflicts of Interest
Client-facing professionals like financial advisors, accountants, therapists and healthcare providers often discourage public Facebook use to prevent conflicts of interest. Keeping profiles private helps maintain appropriate client/advisor boundaries.
Control Your Online Audience
Public profiles mean anyone can see what you share. This likely includes family members, colleagues, acquiantances, past contacts and more. Private settings let you control and curate your audience.
Share on Your Own Terms
Having an open profile means distant relatives, old classmates, or former co-workers can look you up and see anything you post. This lack of control makes many uncomfortable oversharing. Custom privacy allows sharing on your own terms.
Prevent Misunderstandings
Different social groups understand your humor, views and online persona differently. Inside jokes among friends can seem offensive to professional contacts. Private settings let you target posts to intended audiences and avoid misunderstandings.
Protect Your Kids’ Privacy
Parents sharing family photos and updates openly online can compromise children’s privacy and safety. Private profiles help protect your kids.
Prevent Dangerous Attention
Publicly posted photos, names, ages and locations of children can attract dangerous attention from predators. Keeping profiles private protects kids from this risk.
Allow Them to Control Their Digital Footprint
What parents post about kids on public social media becomes part of their permanent digital footprint without consent. A private profile lets your children control their online image as they get older.
Maintain Your Social Life
Having an open Facebook profile can disrupt your other social relationships when people take public posts out of context.
Avoid Drama With Friends & Family
Inside jokes, party photos, political rants and gossip visible publicly often upset family and friends who don’t understand the context. Avoid this social drama by keeping your profile private.
Prevent Relationship Issues
Your partner may get the wrong idea seeing flirty interactions between you and friends posted publicly. Couples often fight over misinterpreted Facebook posts. Private settings let you avoid misunderstandings.
Protect Your Home’s Security
Publicly visible Facebook posts with too many personal details can make you and your family vulnerable to home burglaries and targeted crimes.
Don’t Share Travel Plans
Check-ins, photos and trip updates posted from your open profile tip potential thieves off that your home is empty. Keep travel plans private to protect your unattended home.
Avoid Visible Home Details
Posts with photos showing home interiors/exteriors, addresses, license plates, valuables and family routines provide information scammers use to target you. Keep profiles private to prevent this.
Defend Against Scams
Scammers use open Facebook profiles to gather ammo for cons, hacks and malware attacks. A private account denies them recon data.
Prevent Spear Phishing
Scammers use personal info like employers, schools, birthday etc. from public profiles for spear phishing attacks with custom bait emails. Don’t provide this data to protect against phishing.
Avoid Doxing
“Doxing” refers to hacking someone by piecing together data from multiple sources. Facebook provides a trove of personal data hackers leverage for doxing. Private settings deny them this.
Conclusion
Keeping your Facebook profile private offers important privacy, security, reputation and social benefits. It allows you to retain control over sensitive personal information and how you present yourself online. Custom privacy settings empower you to share comfortably with only your chosen groups. Especially as facial recognition tech expands, limiting public exposure of photos containing biometrics also keeps your identity secure. While Facebook encourages open sharing, your personal brand, employment, relationships and family are all better protected behind private profile settings you control.