THINGS FACEBOOK WON’T TELL YOU:

There are 845 million monthly active Facebook members, few of whom know about these 7 insider secrets condensed from RD.com…

1) Facebook keeps the default sharing setting as ‘Public’ as it’s better for them if you share more. They assume most of us won’t bother to change privacy settings.

2) Some information can’t be made private on Facebook. Your name, profile picture, cover picture, network, gender, and username are always publicly available.

3) Be selective in choosing friends and Liking pages.If you say yes to everyone, you’re going to see lots of things in your news feed you don’t care about, and you’ll have to take the extra time to filter them out.

4) Whenever you are signed in, Facebook tracks you while you surf the Internet.

5) Be careful when you ‘like’ a company, or post about a product. Your interaction might be shown to your friends as an ad for that company.

6) You may not see every post from your friends. Facebook moves up the posts that are the most ‘liked’, ‘shared’, and commented on.

7) Lots of users hate Timeline, but it’s not going away anytime soon.It’s a more effective way for people to share, it’s visually appealing, and brands love it because it gives them a better platform to market their business and show people who they are.

8) In a recent filing, Facebook estimated that as many as 83 million of its profiles are fake, though some are duplicate pages set up by real people.

9) Want to know how much Facebook knows about you? Go to ‘Account Settings’ in the ‘Home’ menu and click ‘Download a copy of your Facebook data’.

10) Connect to a Wi-Fi network before using your phone to log on to Facebook to get the site to work faster and more efficiently.

11) Hide from all your friends on Facebook Chat by going to the chat box and clicking Go Offline. If it’s just one particularly annoying friend that you want to avoid, click on his name in the chat window, hit the cog icon that’s in the top right, and choose Go Offline to [Name]. 

12) If your posts are set to be Public, burglars can see your status updates and figure out when you’re not in town. Insurance companies may also use posted information to raise a premium or deny a claim.

13) They make money by selling ad space to companies that want to reach you.They give us demographics—the desired location, career, education level—and we put their ads on the pages of those who meet the criteria.

~Vanessa