Facebook is used for personal as well as business purposes. We upload personal pictures to share it with our friends and relatives, but that’s not all. The social network holds a great deal of personal information, and those who take privacy seriously must take a few steps to ensure that their personal images and information is not misused.
If you are using Facebook then you already know that you cannot make your profile picture and cover photo private. This is good because when you want to add a friend, or send a request to someone, you can click on his/her profile pic and verify the identity. It’s bad because anyone (even a person who is not your friend) can click on your profile pic and see an enlarged version of your pic. Previously, strangers could only see a small 160 x 160 pixel version of the profile pic, but not anymore. Check out these tips that you can follow to protect your profile pic on the social network.
Crop your new profile pic
Facebook has improved how cropping works. Previously when you cropped the photo, it would just be cropped for the small version of the photo, and an enlarged version was displayed when you clicked on the thumbnail, but not anymore. Now, this crop tool crops both your small photo and full-size photo into a square.
If you are using an old profile pic, people will still be able to see the full enlarged version of the pic. In this case, delete your old pic and upload a new one.
Change the privacy setting of your Facebook profile pic
By default, your profile pic is public. This means that strangers will not only be able to see your current profile pic, but also other previous photos that you have not deleted. Apart from that, all your likes and comments on that pic would also be displayed to the stranger.
To hide your likes, comments, tags and location data from these photos, open each profile photo and click on Edit. Next, click on the privacy button and under “Who should see this?”, select Only Me. Note that you should do this for every profile pic that you have uploaded to Facebook.
So that’s how you can protect your profile photo to some extent on Facebook. However, that said, we hope Facebook will provide more granular controls related to profile pics and cover photos in the future.
