Privacy is a very important factor whenever we browse the Internet. Especially when we use services such as social networks, our data could be exposed. Hence the importance of always taking precautionary measures and not making mistakes that may affect our personal information. In this article we are going to talk about how to prevent our Facebook data from being available on Google to anyone.
How to prevent Facebook data from being available to anyone
Facebook is undoubtedly one of the most popular social networks with the most users in our country. It has been mired in controversies related to privacy on many occasions. At the end of the day, we must bear in mind that our personal information has great value on the net. It can be used for profit by third parties.
A very important point that we must mention is that a social media profile, Facebook in this case, can be integrated with search engines . That basically means that anyone could google and find what our user is. If we do not want this to be possible, we must follow the steps that we are going to mention below.
Fortunately, Facebook offers us a wide range of possibilities in terms of options to maintain security and privacy at all times. One of them is to prevent our profile from being indexed in search engines and from being available to anyone.
Steps to prevent Google from indexing a Facebook account
The first thing we have to do is log in through a computer’s browser. We must enter the desktop version for this. Once we are inside, we must click on the menu at the top right (the arrow) and then on Settings and privacy.
When we are at this point we must click on Settings , which is the first option that appears. There we must click Privacy and inside we will see different options to be able to protect our data and not compromise personal information.
One of those options, if we go all the way down, is to prevent Google from indexing the Facebook account . By default, the box will be checked to allow this to happen. It indicates that in this way someone could find us who does not use the search engine of the social network itself.
In our case, for the purpose of preventing the profile from being indexed in search engines, we are going to uncheck this box . It is something that we will be able to reverse at any time if we are interested in changing it and reappearing in Google and other search engines.
Of course, even removing that option and ensuring that search engines do not index our profile, this process can take a while . It is not something immediate, since Google may take to index a web address again, which in this case would be our user profile of the social network. The same would happen if in the future we want it to be re-indexed; it would also take a while.
Does not hide the profile on Facebook
Keep in mind that what we are doing with this process that we have explained is hiding the Facebook profile in search engines such as Google. However, this will not prevent them from finding us through the search engine of the social network itself.
That is, someone could enter Facebook, go to the search engine that it offers and put our data there. In case we have an account on the social network and we are not using any name with the aim of making it anonymous, we will appear for anyone.
A different case would be to prevent the information from being available to anyone other than our contact. It basically means making the Facebook account private . We can easily configure it and modify the points that interest us the most.
To do this we go back to Settings , enter Privacy and just above the search engine indexing we will see some options related to how other users can find us.
There we can mark, for example, that only our contacts can see the list of friends, who can find us with the e-mail address or even who could send us a friend request. These are basic points that we can change to improve privacy.
