There are a number of ways you can protect your privacy while using Facebook on your iPad so you can feel assured that your private information is kept as secure as possible. To start with, login to your Facebook account on your iPad and click on the little gear icon in the upper right hand screen. This will allow you to go into your Settings and from that point you will see Privacy in the left hand navigation. When you tap on that, you will be able to prompt whether ‘Everyone’, ‘Friends of friends’ or ‘Friends only’ are allowed to see posts. You can also limit old posts, send friend requests, send messages and choose what other information is kept private, such as your phone number.  Setting these choices to ‘Friend’s Only’ is the most private setting and will only allow those people that are friends of yours on Facebook to view this data.

When you have made the choices of who can view or interact with your Facebook account on your iPad, you can then edit your Friends list by creating separate lists. For example, you can create a list of work friends, school friends, family and so forth. When you create posts, you can then choose which lists can see those posts and which ones will not be able to see what you’ve posted. To do this, go to your Facebook homepage and then tap on “Friends” in the left hand column, and then tap on “Create a list” and choose which of your friends can be in that list. Then, whenever you create a post, you will which list you are posting it to in the bottom right hand part of the post and can change that to make sure only certain lists see it. You can then control who can comment on your posts by choosing who can comment on posts in Privacy Settings.

After you have created your friend’s lists, you can then choose your Chat privacy settings to regulate who sees that you are online. To do this, click on the options and choose which lists or which friends can see that you are online. You will then appear offline to everyone else.

In order to protect your photos on Facebook for your iPad, you can set your albums to ‘Friends only’ so only your friends can see the images you upload. You need to choose this for each different album to make sure all your photos are protected. For some albums, you will need to go into each individual photo.

To choose which apps can access your account, go back into Settings and then Apps. You might be surprised to see some that you don’t even remember allowing access to your account, so review this list thoroughly and click the “X” button to the right of each app that you want to remove permission to access data from your account.

When you have set all the privacy settings for Facebook on your iPad, they will work on every other device that you choose to access Facebook from. Review your settings from time to time, especially which apps are accessing your account to keep it as secure as possible.