You might have seen this obnoxious post from several of your friends on Facebook today…
There is a much easier way to accomplish the goal of “hiding your every move” without having to flood the news feed asking your friends to hover around Facebook and click a bunch of buttons all because you’re worried they’ll see your Farmville addiction. Start by going to YOUR OWN FACEBOOK PROFILE.
When you see some activity that you don’t want your friends to see (as shown above) click the X to the right…
After you click the X you’ll have the option to Hide all of this activity from your profile (and your friends’ tickers).
Once you hit Hide all your friends will no longer see this activity, click Edit Options to see what else is hidden
You can see above, my friends will not see when I friend somebody, like something, or comment somewhere
Now isn’t this a little easier? If you agree please share this with your Friends!
seems easier to hover over a name and just check the boxes..
Yes, if you want to control what YOU see.. this is to control what YOUR FRIENDS will see – Kev
Enjoy clicking 700+ names then! I preffer the way explained by Kevin! ;-)
What much more sensible, less hostile way of fixing that. Thanks!
Thanks for the comment Mike!
An even easier way is to create a list with everyone in it and limit what can be viewed by them. Only have to do it once rather than for each type of blab.
I did that in the past as well but you can no longer do that with the new changes to Facebook’s Settings & Privacy Controls, have a look
Yes. That’s the easiest way – and it still works like a charm.
Kevin, you should have a look for yourself before posting such rubbish.
Nice post Kevin. Although I’m one of the suckers who has activated the new FB timeline with that developer-hack thing posted on Mashable, and now I don’t see recent activity in the same way *at all* on my own profile page :( Any tips for those of us who have done this?
Rob.. There is a box on your timeline for “Most Recent Activity” and when you click the X it gives you a similar option.. I have not tested it though, but try it!
Cheers Kevin, I tried that but the x only lets you remove comments (i.e. delete them), it doesn’t offer the ‘hide all activity’ option :(
I know, I was hesitant to even do this post because I realize it will be null & void when the timeline comes out of beta & Facebook finalizes the ticker algorithm, but at least it can keep this status update out of some people’s news feeds! Ha, now if I could only do something to get people to stop re-posting that Facebook is going to start charging for use! =) Cheers
this has NOTHING to do with the live feed thing though…the life feed that is new on Facebook brings up your activity AS IT HAPPENS… while what you described above will remove what you’ve posted in the past…which means this is NOT removing the time line feed and the latter is what people want…
I do not understand the comment, are you referring to the Ticker or the new Timeline? I am a developer and have the Timeline (which the public doesn’t) and while these steps mentioned in the article do not work exactly the same, you will still have the ability to hide activity from the ticker (i.e. what music you listen to and what shows you watch).
The point of this article was that you don’t have to invite your Facebook friends to “hide” you (most status updates are only seen by 15% of a person’s friends/fans) so you would not be reaching your entire friend list. Not only are you inviting them to hide EVERYTHING (most don’t even know this feature exists and they will probably not just hide your comments/game activity but rather everything you say), but all it takes is some initiative on the user’s part to do this themselves and control what THEY share. When the new features are in place, you might not be able to hide your activity as the steps above show, but you still will be able to and I’ll do a post on that to help users walk through it. Thanks for the comment! I appreciate all feedback
Your suggestions seems to limit what comments your friends can see. Isn’t the whole point of Facebook to share comments with friends? Isn’t the problem with the new setting on Facebook that the default setting is that friends of my friends can read my posts, and I might not want to share with them?
Yes you are right. People are worried that their friends will see their every move and they are posting updates asking them to go through these steps, essentially ruining the Facebook experience. I am not saying this should be done, I am just saying YOU can control it rather than rely on friends a)seeing your status update b)doing it c)inviting them to hide more than just your games/comments
i had these settings long ago and it does not hide your activity from the ticker, only the profile. my friend shared your article on her fb page. we are currently commenting on it and i logged into my mom’s account and saw all the comments i made on her ticker. what you are calling an obnoxious post actually does work. i hid comments and likes from most of my friends and they no longer show up on the ticker.
That may be the case with the new Timeline/Ticker features. But my friends do not see my “likes” so I’m not sure if this is still a “beta” feature being tinkered with by Facebook or not. Many changes are coming in the next few weeks, esp. on Thursday when the new Timeline will be available to the entire public & this article I did will more than likely be null & void because we will all be working with a new set of Facebook features/settings. Thank you for the comment!
I’m with Christy. This does not work for me. I have had my “likes” and “comments” hidden for awhile and my friends are still seeing my likes and comments. This does not work (at least for some of us) and I’m not sure why. I “think” it may have something to do with games but I’m not entirely sure. I believe that if you “like” a game, it is listed as a “game” and not a “like or comment”. But for now my solution is to not post until the next update and see what new fancy stuff they come up this time.
That might be the best idea, it seems that while the timeline & ticker are in beta mode, changes are happening daily. The item that has not changed is that if you do the above method, whatever you hide will at least not show up listed on your profile for friends to go back & see anytime they want (as long as you have the old profile).
Lia and Christy have it right. I too have had these ‘hide al __’ settings for months. My comments still show up on the ticker, even though they remain hidden on the wall. A contradictory application of rules.
I don’t think this gets at what I want to do. I don’t want to hide my activities so much as I want to hide my friends’. For example, I don’t want to see anyone’s games. Is there an easy way to unsubscribe to everyone’s games.
As of right now there is not a “hide all game activity from your friends” button but please remember these new features are in beta still according to Facebook & I’m sure changes will continue to be rolled out based on feedback, etc…
OK, I’m trying this and two things occurred: 1. when I clicked ‘edit options’ before clicking ‘Hide all’ there was nothing listen (I guess because I had not settings yet?), and 2. once I clicked ‘Hide all’ there seems to be no way to get back into this settings panel and change the settings. Where do I go in privacy settings (or elsewhere) to get this panel back up?
Never mind! I found it. “If you want to undo this setting, use the Edit Options link at the bottom of your profile to add these stories back into your profile view. ” [Feel free to remove both these comments unless this is helpful info.]
I spoke too soon. Info at https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=203617413009493&ref_query=Hide+all+recent+comment+activity does not work (at least in my profile) the way it is described. I can ‘Hide all’ or revert to show all. The time in the edit options list is only ‘Hidden Stories: Recent Activity (1), Comment activity’ with not way to keep Likes but hide Comments, etc. This is all very complicated.
It is going to get more complicated in the next 4 days as Facebook rolls out the Ticker to everyone & the Timeline on Thursday! Look for more posts on Thursday/Friday explaining new changes
Yeah, as I suspected this doesn’t keep your activity from showing up in other people’s feeds and/or tickers.
However, the root of the problem is with the PERMISSIONS of the original item you’re responding to.
Suppose you’re friends with “Alan” and Alan is friends with “Bob” but you and Bob are not friends. Bob really likes Sarah Palin , Alan knows you hate Sarah Palin but has a secret obsession with her he doesn’t want you to know about. Alan has set, via the above-described drop-down on his activities, to hide his activity ON HIS WALL as you have instructed, therefore he thinks his secret is safe and he can talk about it with non-mutual friends no problem since there’s no trace in his own profile.
Bob posts a photo from a rally or makes a wall post about Sarah and it it set for whatever reason with “public” or “friends of friends” visibility/audience. Of course you’re not going to see this photo or wall post since you’re not friends with Bob. Nor will you be able to go to Alan’s wall/profile and see that Alan even responded. However, due to facebook’s stupid new subscription defaults, you get non only Alan’s gleeful response to Bob’s post in your feed/ticker, you even get to see what BOB posted in the first place. Bob probably doesn’t know that, and may or may not care that you can see his own activity (since he’s the one that made the permissions public or F-O-F) but Bob almost certainly doesn’t realize the implications to Alan that setting his permissions that way now have.
Previously for me to find out Alan’s little secret would require me to somehow find and view Bob’s post/photo, which would typically require me to go to some effort and to even know it exists in the first place. Now it’s thrust at me by default, and *I* have to go to the trouble of turning off the subscription to Alan’s comments/likes in order to preserve Alan’s perceived privacy. That still doesn’t prevent me from being able to go directly to Bob’s content if I had a direct link or via Bob’s profile if I were inclined to view it and had the inclination, which is possible due to the original permissions.
Now, had Bob’s original permissions been set to “friends” only, none of this would be a concern, as I would not be able to view Bob’s content via any means, and therefore any activity related to it is also not visible to me and could (should) not appear on my feed or ticker.
So the lesson here is that if you don’t want your activity to be visible, PAY ATTENTION to the permissions of each and every item you respond to, and post accordingly. There’s a little icon near the timestamp of every item that reveals the permissions if you hover over it.
And of course let’s not forget that from YOUR perspective, your feed (and ticker if you didn’t block it within minutes of it appearing) became FLOODED with updates about things your friends were doing in response to PEOPLE AND GROUPS YOU JUST DON’T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT and do not want to see. Conveniently facebook made this a default setting, and you have to turn off subcriptions to comments/likes on a per-friend basis. Except as of a couple of days ago, this functionality simply DID NOT WORK no matter how you did it or how often. I spent over an hour the other night and the next morning going through each and every friend and un-checking the “likes and comments” item from my subscriptions, and still I was seeing the stuff popping up in my feed. I then started using the similar feature in the drop-down beside each item in my feed, also to no avail. I finally added filters for “commented on” and ” likes ” to my FB Purity plug-in to keep that garbage out of my feed. I think at this time facebook might have actually fixed that glitch, as I’m not seeing that sort of thing if I reveal the hidden content, but holy hell that was annoying for a couple of days.
Oops, I wrote that up in Wordpad which appeared to automatically break that into paragraphs with a blank line between them.
how do i undo this action?
This is great advice but why adopt such an acerbic tone? Calling the attempts of my friends to protect their own privacy ‘obnoxious’ is an opinion I want to endorse. For that reason I will not be reposting this.
it doesn’t work, it does hide your activities on you profile page or wall, but it doesn’t hide your activities from the ticker.
It is hiding for some & not all.. with the “Timeline” & Ticker in beta mode, Facebook is working on perfecting the settings from what we can tell.. Thursday will be the deciding day when Timeline is rolled out to the public & all settings should be finalized
I do this. Bu how can I turn off the advertising and reccomended friends thing? I have no interest in the sidebar things. The economy is bad and I do not want a sidebar. I don’t need help deciding to friend or what to purchase, etc..
Sorry Lynnette, you can’t turn that off… That is how Facebook makes $$ & allows the service to be free for users like you & I
How do you do this if you’ve already hidden your activity from your wall? I know my hubby has his activity hidden but he still shows up in my ticker.
Vicki… We will post an updated Privacy Guide on Thursday right here on B2C… Facebook is rolling out changes all week & while their new “Timeline” is in beta (it comes out Thursday to the public) so some people are experiencing different settings than others right know, so come Thursday this post will be completely out-dated as you won’t even have the same “Wall” as we refer to – Hang in there! Some people don’t even have the ticker yet
Here’s an idea: DON’T PUBLISH ANYTHING ON FACEBOOK YOU DON’T WANT THE WORLD TO KNOW ABOUT. It was invented by a couple of Gen Xers raised in the Jerry Springer age…ZERO respect for privacy – their own or anybody else’s. If you haven’t figured that out by now…..
I use this stuff in presentations all the time… also, you didn’t just get behind a steering while & hit the highway, you learned the rules of the road… don’t just get on Facebook and go nuts, learn the rules of the road, dive into the privacy settings & be smart about it.. Thanks for the comment!
Doesn’t all this hiding defeat what FB is for?? I wanna know what my friends post…that’s what its all about??
Yes it does.. I’m not FOR hiding your activity, I’m more PRO adding only people you know in real life & consider a “friend”.. My profile is for friends, My business page is for everybody else
Any suggestions for “someone”, me, that accidentally hit the button without clicking on Edit Options first? Now I don’t know how to get it back to edit instead of just hiding all. Thanks for the article and the help!
Susan, honestly I would just sit back & wait till Thursday when Facebook rolls out the new “Timeline” to the public & the back end account/privacy settings (where they are, what to click) will once again change… I’ll do posts on some of those new updates :)
Isn’t easier for people who don’t want other people to see what they are doing just NOT TO JOIN FACEBOOK?
can you tell me how to make sure that people are friends of friends can NOT see pictures/comments of mine that my friends ‘like’ ?
What people are trying to achieve with said ‘obnoxious post’ is to hide things from the ticker, the option to hide things from our profiles has been there for a long time. As many others have said, hiding things from your profile does nothing to hide activity from the ticker.
You’re not offering a solution to the ticker problem, so why be so bitchy about the ‘obnoxious post’? It is not a rumour. Right now, it’s the only thing we can do to stop our every move from being broadcast, short of simply not commenting on or liking any public or semi-public post.
As for ‘ruining the facebook experience’: facebook is indeed for sharing. If I want to share something with all my facebook contacts, I will write a status. If I don’t want my professional contacts to see a certain update, I will hide it from them specifically. If I comment on my friend Jimmy’s post, it’s fine by me if our 10 mutual friends see it, but why on earth would I want my 330 other contacts who do not know Jimmy to?
But aren’t the ‘Things I like’ only pages you like? So if you like some photo or a status of someone who has his or her profile on public, your like will still be public? I get that people say that this is Facebook and other wise you should just not have Facebook, but my biggest problem is that I can see when friends comment or like the statusses (stati?) of friends that are STRANGERS to me, and vice versa! But I don’t want to see that and I don’t want that they see my activity with people they don’t know!
Instead of calling people’s posts “obnoxious,” it might be nice if this information were shared by FB in the first place–instead of people opening FB one day and seeing all kinds of drastic changes. No wonder people are confused. And it’s not about hiding, or not wanting people to see what we are doing…I think it reflects a level of annoyance with things like the ticker, which seems to me to be completely unnecessary. I couldn’t care less which of my friends (my REAL friends, who I KNOW) post “Happy Birthday” to someone I don’t know (the kind of junk that shows up in the ticker) and I don’t want to annoy people with these dumb things either.
Hi Kevin,
Thanks! But….now I’ve hidden it and I don’t know how to get back to the settings to change it again. Do you know?
Thanks!
Regards,
Judith
This doesn’t work! I’ve had my comments etc hidden on my profile for ages. When I commented on a photo album with public settings all my friends could see it. This info tells you the only thing that works: http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/09/26/facebook-ticker-privacy-scare/
Hi Kevin,
Do you know if the ticker behaves in the same way for ‘secret groups’? I noticed in my ticker that I could see a friend’s comment to a post in a secret group that we both have access to. Those type of comments don’t usually and still don’t show up on our walls (the pre-timeline version), but they do now show up in the ticker. I am now wondering, can other friends who do not have access to that secret group, see those comments in their ticker as well, hover over it and read the whole group post in their ticker, even though they do not have access to that secret group?
Let me know if you can.
Thanks!
YEah this is a lot better…If i have to do them all manualy that will take a day.thx
Please Kevin, can you tell me how I change back these settings? I have done what you mentioned, but I would really like to see everything again on my wall. (see earlier comment)
Thanks!
Never mind I found it! All the way down on your wall page you can choose edit option. By the way, hiding your commets on your wall does NOT mean other people don’t see it, my friends can still see all my posts. So unfortunately this is not the solution….
Man.. this only hides activity from your wall.. or timeline.. but still.. that TICKER BOX !! everyone can still see your recent activity -_-
Dear facebook owner.
May I ask you to do something for me: I like to keep private friends with you. However, with the recent changes in FB, the public can now see all of our activities on the bulletin board. This happens when a friend of ours, click on “COMMENTS & LIKES” Automatically get all their friends to see our posts! Unfortunately we cannot change the settings manually, because Facebook has configured it this way. So I need your help. Only my friends can do this for me. Example: Place your mouse on my name above (do not click), there appears a window with the mouse on “FRIENDS” to stand (without clicking), then move down to “Settings”, click here and display a list of options . REMOVE the checkmark at “REACTIONS and FIND-I-fun” by clicking on. By doing this, my activities my friends and will not be shown publicly. Thank you! Care for our privacy.
Thanks in advance