Social media accounts help you share your daily life with friends; however, the mobile apps can go further than that by automatically alerting your friends that you are online, reading a message, or even your nearby location.
If you don’t want your nearest and dearest to know what you are up to every minute of every day, as a general rule, try posting less frequently on the social media platform. Your photos, check-ins, and text updates can convey more information than you intend. Beyond that, here’s how to tweak certain key settings on your apps to leave a smaller digital footprint.
Turn Off Your Activity Status
Many social apps will show your friends a notification when you are online, and even when you’re offline, they can display the last time you visited. If you’d rather not broadcast your presence, many social networks will let you turn off this display.
Turn off read receipts
When you are trying to preserve your privacy, one-on-one messaging options let you stay off the social media radar while still keeping in touch with your friends. To preserve your privacy, first turn off read receipts, those notifications that let your friends know when you’ve read their messages.In the Facebook Messenger and Snapchat apps, you can’t turn off read receipts, but sticking to individual chats in apps will preserve your lurker status better than posting on public social media networks.
Stay off the map
Social media apps can use your current location to feed you relevant ads and alert you about nearby events; however, there is one thing that most of you are unaware of it that they can also broadcast your whereabouts. This feature you might want to turn off if you want to protect your privacy from your friends.
Facebook also shares your location with your friends. To disable this feature, tap the menu button (three horizontal lines) on the right-hand side of the screen. On Android, your next step is to pick Account Settings; on iOS, choose Settings, followed by Account Settings. Either way, follow up by tapping Location, selecting Nearby Friends, and setting the main toggle switch to off. This will prevent your friends from looking up your current location or getting alerts when you’re in the area.
These networks can also attach your location to your status updates. On the bright side, Facebook and Twitter make it easy to avoid oversharing: They will only reveal your location if you specifically tap the location-tagging button while composing your post. Still, it’s worth double-checking your message before you post, to make sure you’re not accidentally revealing too much.
Limit the audience
To use social media networks without broadcasting your presence, we’ve discussed sending direct messages to a few contacts rather than posting updates for all of them to see. In addition to that method, Facebook lets you limit the audience for your updates on a post-by-post basis.
Conclusion
Whenever you are drafting an update, tap the audience selector button just under your name—it will probably say Friends, but it might have another label, depending on the default audience for your posts. Once you tap it, you can limit who will be able to see this update: Simply select More followed by Specific friends. This lets you hide your update from most people on Facebook while still adding to the News Feed of a few select contacts. Hope this post works for you well, if it does, do share your feedback with us in below comment section.