Facebook privacy settings: Make your Facebook profile unsearchable

Facebook makes more of your information visible to strangers by default than most people expect. Your name and profile photo are always visible on the platform, and, depending on your settings, your profile may also appear in search results or be discoverable through external search engines.

This guide walks you through the key privacy settings you can change to significantly reduce who can find your profile and what they can see.

Quick answer: The essential Facebook privacy settings

Do the following to protect yourself as quickly as possible:

1. Set future posts to Friends or Only Me: Settings > Audience & Visibility > Posts
2. Limit who can find you by email/phone: Settings > Audience & Visibility > How People Find and Contact You > set both lookup options to No one
3. Disable search engine indexing: turn off the option to let external search engines link to your profile
4. Restrict friend requests to Friends of friends: set Who can send you friend requests to Friends of friends
5. Limit past posts: Settings > Audience & Visibility > Posts > Limit Past Posts (note: this can’t be undone in bulk)
6. Review Profile and Tagging settings: turn on tag review so nothing appears on your timeline without your approval

These six changes remove most of the ways strangers can stumble across your account.

How to make your Facebook profile unsearchable: Step-by-step

Here’s every step to follow to make your profile unsearchable:

1. Use Facebook’s Privacy Checkup tool

The fastest way to start is Facebook’s built-in Privacy Checkup. Access it via your profile photo (top right) > Settings & Privacy > Privacy Checkup. It walks you through your most important settings in one place—worth doing first before making manual changes.

2. Control who can find you by email or phone number

This is the setting most people miss. Even if you’ve never publicly listed your phone number, Facebook uses the number you provided for two-factor authentication to let others find your profile. The same applies to your sign-up email address.

Go to: Settings > Audience & Visibility > How People Find and Contact You

Set these to No one:

• Who can look you up using your email address?
• Who can look you up using your phone number?

Toggle this to Off:

• Do you want search engines outside Facebook to link to your profile?

This prevents someone who finds your contact details in a data breach, on LinkedIn, or through a people-search site from tracing you to your Facebook account.

3. Lock down your posts and profile details

Navigate to Settings & privacy > Settings > Audience & Visibility and work through each section:

• Posts — Set future posts to Friends or Only Me
• Stories — Limit to Friends
• Profile and Tagging — Set who can post on your profile, who can see posts you’re tagged in, and enable tag review

For past posts, use the Limit Past Posts option under Posts. However, be aware this is a one-way action. If you later want specific old posts to be public again, you’ll need to change each one individually.

4. Control friend requests

Restricting who can send you friend requests won’t make your profile unsearchable, but it significantly reduces unwanted contact.

Go to: Audience and visibility > How People Find and Contact You > Who can send you friend requests? and set it to Friends of friends

5. Remove personal information from your profile

Data brokers routinely scrape public Facebook profiles. If you’ve filled in the About section, consider removing:

• Employer and job title
• Phone numbers and email addresses
• Current city and hometown
• Relationship status and family links

Go to your profile > Edit Profile > Edit Details to remove anything you don’t want publicly visible.

Note on phone numbers: If you remove your phone number from Facebook entirely, you’ll lose the ability to use it for two-factor authentication. A safer approach is to keep it for security purposes, but set the lookup permission to No one (as described in step 2).

What about Facebook’s Lock Profile feature?

Facebook’s Lock Profile feature restricts your profile so that non-friends can only see a limited version. They won’t be able to see full photos, posts, or detailed information. It’s essentially a one-tap version of all the manual steps above.

However, it’s only available in certain regions, including India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and some countries in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Users in the US, UK, Canada, and most of Europe don’t have access to it. If you’re in an unsupported region, the manual settings in this guide achieve the same result.

What about Facebook tracking you across the web?

Making your profile unsearchable is one thing, but it’s important to note that Facebook continues tracking your behavior across other websites even when you’re not on the platform. This happens through cookies, browser trackers, and Meta’s Pixel technology embedded in millions of third-party sites.

To limit this, go to: Settings > Accounts Center > Your information and permissions > Your activity off Meta technologies

From there, you can disconnect previous activity and toggle off future off-Facebook tracking. This won’t stop Facebook entirely, but it significantly reduces the amount of data linked back to your account.

A VPN can add another layer of protection by masking your IP address from Facebook when you’re browsing externally. That said, if you’re logged into Facebook, it still knows who you are. A VPN for Facebook is most useful for protecting your data on public or monitored networks, or for accessing Facebook in countries where it’s restricted.

How to deactivate your Facebook account temporarily

If you want to disappear from Facebook entirely without permanently deleting your account, deactivation is the option to use. Your profile, photos, and posts become invisible to everyone, and your name won’t appear in search.

Go to: Settings > Accounts Center > Personal Details > Account Ownership and Control > Deactivation or Deletion > Deactivate Account

You can reactivate at any time just by logging back in. Note that messages you’ve already sent will still be visible in other people’s inboxes, and your name may still appear in friends’ contact lists — just not as a clickable link.

Final checklist

Before you finish, confirm you’ve done the following:

• Disable search engine indexing of your profile
• Set email and phone lookup to No one
• Restricted friend requests to Friends of friends
• Set posts (past and future) to Friends or Only Me
• Enabled tag review under Profile and Tagging
• Reviewed your About section and removed sensitive personal details
• Checked Apps and Websites under Your Activity for any connected services you no longer use

Once these are in place, your profile is significantly harder to discover and much more restricted to non-friends. It’ll also be much harder to find via external search engines or people search sites.

More Facebook articles:

• How to spot a fake Facebook account
• Will Facebook ban me for using a VPN?

Frequently asked questions