A short while ago we had some users alert us to the fact that their ‘Open’ Facebook Groups were displayed on their Timeline. In case you didn’t know, you can navigate to your own Timeline and click the ‘View As‘ button to see what information displays to the Public. This is a good feature to make sure you aren’t revealing information that you would rather keep private. You can access this feature by clicking the down arrow in the bottom corner of your Cover Photo.
My Timeline is shown below, and you can see that 11 of my open groups appear on this page.
Most people probably realize that an Open Group means just that. It is open to the public and anyone can join in and participate. However, this doesn’t mean that you necessarily want anyone scoping out your public profile to have easy access to this information.
We were surprised to find that Facebook doesn’t make it easy to hide this information from public view. Other sections have privacy controls, but for some reason they don’t exist for Groups. Your only option is to hide this section. To do this, you’ll need to navigate to your Timeline and click the ‘About’ link just below your Cover Photo.
Once you are here, you have a couple of options. You can click the Edit Sections link shown above and uncheck ‘Groups,’ or you can scroll down and locate your Groups section and click the ‘Hide Section‘ link shown below:
After doing this, use the ‘View As’ feature again to make sure that your open Groups aren’t displaying for the world to see. Keep in mind that people in these groups will see that you are a member, and there are software applications out there that can scrape user information from these groups.
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