Change These Default Privacy Settings Now! Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Apple, LinkedIn, Yahoo and Amazon

Stephen Ajulu
4 min readJun 3, 2019

From 2018 to the past few months of 2019, our personal data from social media sites and other tech giants has been hacked, scandalized and or abused breaching our privacy. It is now high time we go through the default privacy settings of most of these sites. In this guide, we’ll try and simplify the settings and change the default and bring back control back to you. Most of the steps work well if you access the sites from the web.

Facebook

Change who can see your Facebook friends from public to friends or only me using this link.

Review posts you’re tagged in before the post appears on your timeline using this link.

Switch to No to Facebook’s face recognition using this link. Facebook won’t be able to recognize you in photos and videos and thus won’t recommend tagging you in photos but the downside is that you won’t get a heads-up from the social media giant when someone else posts a photo of you. It has its own privacy controversies.

Um, no thanks, @facebook. I wonder how long this will be opt-in. pic.twitter.com/ek5kDzOOsF

- Walt Mossberg (@waltmossberg) February 27, 2018

On the Ad preferences settings page, head over and switch off ads based on your relationship status, employer, job title and education

While you’re still here, scroll down and toggle on the Not Allowed for Ads based on your activity on Facebook Company Products that you see elsewhere and Ads based on data from partners.

Twitter

Disable personalization used for ad targeting using this link.

Yahoo

To turn off personalized advertising, use this link. The link gives you access to your dashboard where you can disagree or toggle off options including Precise Location.

Google

Turn off web and app activity so that Google doesn’t know you well and while you’re there you can also pause location history. Google has said that in the future it will stop asking you to turn on this function when you first set up Google Assistant on your Android phone.

Turn off Ads personalization too.

Apple

On the iPhone, turn on Limit Ad Tracking.

Microsoft

If you don’t use Cortana, you can delete what it already knows. Use this link, click view and clear the data it has collected. Go to the Cortana Tab and clear Cortana Data.

On your laptop, go to Settings > Privacy > General and turn off Let apps use advertising ID to make ads more interesting to you based on your app usage.

Amazon

Delete Alexa recordings by clicking this link.

Turn off voice purchasing by going to the settings of the Alexa app and scrolling down to Voice Purchasing. This will stop anyone with access to your Echo speaker and stop random purchases when they talk to it. You can also add a voice code too.

Set your Amazon wish list to private. Tap the three dots next to the share list, tap manage list and then switch from private.

This link will stop Amazon from tracking you. Head to Browsing History on the Amazon homepage, click View and Edit and then turn off Manage History.

LinkedIn

Head to the LinkedIn’s privacy settings. Turn your visibility off from the public here.

Switch to Private Mode too.

Toggle Sharing Profile edits to No so that LinkedIn doesn’t broadcast your change in your connection.

Change your birthday visibility. Go to LinkedIn, click on the Me icon, View Profile, Tap on contact info, click edit when the window pops up and then under birthday select Only You.

Switch ad settings to No. Also while you’re here, switch off Profile data for ad personalization.

i’ll keep updating this guide with new information.

Hi there! My Name is Stephen Ajulu. I am the author and founder of Ajulu’s Thoughts. Welcome To My World! Like, share, subscribe and leave a comment or two. Inquiries → alunje73@pm.me Read More: https://ajulusthoughts.wordpress.com/about/ View all posts by Mr. Stephen Ąjulu

Originally published at http://ajulusthoughts.wordpress.com on June 3, 2019.

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Stephen Ajulu

Web Developer, Designer, Creator, and Entrepreneur