Stop Strangers From Finding You in Search on Facebook
Facebook offers privacy settings you can use to control who can find or contact you on the social media site. There are a lot of privacy settings, and Facebook has changed them numerous times as it refines its approach to users’ control of their information. If you don’t know where to find these privacy settings, you might miss them.
Change Your Privacy Settings
There are several levels of privacy you’ll want to consider when adjusting your visibility on Facebook. First, open the Privacy Settings and Tools page by following these steps:
1. Click the down arrow in the top right corner of the Facebook top menu.
2. Select Settings from the drop-down menu.
3. Click Privacy in the left panel menu of the Settings screen. This page is where you can adjust the visibility of your posts, as well as your profile’s visibility in searches.
Privacy Settings for Your Posts
Posting on Facebook makes you visible, and for those who see your posts and then share them, your visibility becomes more widespread and more likely to be discovered by strangers. To counter this, you can change who can see your posts.
In the first section called Your Activity, click Edit next to Who can see your future posts? This setting only affects posts you make after making changes here. It does not change settings on posts you’ve made in the past.
In the drop-down menu, select who is able to see your posts:
• Public: This is the one you do not want to use if you want to hide your posts from strangers.
•Friends: Only your friends can see your posts.
•Friends except: You can select which friends should not be able to see your posts. All your friends will see your posts except those you choose here. When you have made your selections, click Save Changes.
Click More at the bottom of the drop-down menu to see these next two options.
• Specific friends: Select those friends you want to be able to see your posts. Only those selected will see your posts; all other friends will not see them. When you have finished selecting friends, click Save Changes.
Only me: This setting makes your posts invisible to everyone but you when you’re logged into your Facebook account. You might use this if you plan to expand on a post later and aren’t yet ready to publish it; when you’re ready for others to see it, you can then change the privacy setting to a different setting.
Finally, to see this last option, click See All at the bottom of the drop-down menu.
•Custom: This allows you to fine-tune the visibility of your posts. Under Share with, you can enter people or lists of people you want to see your posts. Under Don’t share with, you can enter people or lists of people you do not want to see your posts.
Users won’t be alerted when you have excluded them from seeing a post.
Note: If you tag a person in a post, but that person is not among those you have set as able to see your posts, that person will indeed be able to see the particular post in which you have tagged him or her.
The setting Limit the Audience for Old Posts on Your Timeline will allow you to change the privacy settings on those posts you’ve made in the past. Any posts you’ve made that are Public or visible to Friends of Friends will be restricted to only your friends now.
See more here