Facebook is well known for having confusing and obscure and privacy controls. The little things do make a difference, and this is especially true when it comes to your online privacy and security.

Facebook gives users the ability to control who sees their friends list. We recommend setting this feature to ‘Only Me.’ When cyber criminals hijack a Facebook account, they often extract as much data as possible. This information can be used for identity theft , fraud and the search for more victims.

Just leaving your friends list open to ‘Friends,’ can expose all of your Facebook friends to hackers and scammers. A popular scam involves creating cloned profiles and then targeting everyone on that person’s friends list. If the scammer doesn’t know who a person is friends with, then it’s virtually impossible for them to run this socially engineered scam successfully. They go for the easy money and prey and will likely move on.

Now that we have covered the ‘Why’ – follow the instructions below to lock down your friends list from would-be scammers:

You can navigate directly to this Facebook privacy setting by clicking this link. (you will still need to scroll down to about the middle of the page) If you are on mobile or the link doesn’t work for your device, then go to your Privacy Settings and scroll down to the section with the heading of,  How People Find and Contact You. The second option in this section is ‘Who can see your friends list. Click the ‘Edit’ link and set the Friends List option to “Only Me.”

For more Facebook privacy tips be sure to check out our complete walkthrough on all of they major account and privacy settings:

How to Lockdown Your Facebook Account For Maximum Privacy and Security

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