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Choosing Who Can See Your Information on Facebook

The About section at the top of your Facebook timeline displays information about where you went to school or your relationship status. You can edit the privacy for this content in the same place you edit the information itself. To get there, go to your timeline and then click the Update Info button at the top of the About section.

The About page has several boxes, each representing a different information category. You can augment your Work and Education information by typing the name of your employer or school in the available text boxes. Click the Edit button in the upper-right corner of a box to access additional editing options for that category. Next to each piece of information, an icon appears signifying who can see that piece of information. By default, most of this information is set to Public and visible to Everyone, although contact information is only visible to Friends by default.

Clicking the privacy icon to the right of the field displays the Audience Selector. When you’ve finished changing your settings for any particular category, remember to click Save wherever it appears.

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Timeline information is one of the places where the Only Me setting might come in handy. For example, lots of people don’t like sharing their birthdays on Facebook, but Facebook requires you to enter a birthday when you sign up. By making it visible only to you, it effectively hides your birthday from everyone.

Click Save Changes when you are done editing privacy settings. Otherwise, the new settings won’t stick.

The View As setting allows you to explore how your timeline looks to other people, and also appears to you when you are looking at your own timeline. Click the gear button in the About section of your timeline to open a drop-down menu containing View As. Choosing this option takes you to a preview of your timeline as most people on Facebook see it. In other words, it shows you all the parts of your timeline that are set to Public.

You can also preview how your timeline looks to specific people by entering a name into the text field within the light blue box on top of the preview. For example, if you’ve purposely hidden some content from specific people, you can enter those people’s names just to double-check that you did it correctly and that they only see what you want them to see.

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