Social Media Privacy Settings UK — How to Lock Down Your Accounts
Updated July 2026 · 8 min read · By Silent Erase | ICO Registered C1971457
Your social media profiles are one of the biggest sources of personal information available to data brokers, scammers and identity thieves. Locking down your privacy settings takes less than 30 minutes and significantly reduces your exposure to fraud.
Did you know?
Data brokers scrape public social media profiles automatically to build personal profiles they sell to third parties. Everything you post publicly can end up in a data broker database within hours.
Facebook Privacy Settings
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Profile visibility — Settings → Privacy → Who can see your future posts → Friends only
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Friends list — Profile → Friends → Edit Privacy → Only me
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Phone number — Settings → Personal Information → Remove your phone number completely
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Search visibility — Settings → Privacy → Do you want search engines outside Facebook to link to your profile → No
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Location — Remove your home town and current city from your profile
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Old posts — Settings → Privacy → Limit Past Posts → Limit to Friends
Activity status — Settings → Privacy → Activity Status → Off
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Story sharing — Settings → Privacy → Story → Allow Sharing to Messages → Off
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Location tags — Never tag your home address or regular locations in posts
LinkedIn Privacy Settings
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Profile visibility — Settings → Visibility → Edit your public profile — limit what is visible to non-connections
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Phone number — Remove your phone number from your profile entirely
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Connections visibility — Settings → Visibility → Who can see your connections → Only you
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Profile discovery — Settings → Visibility → Profile discovery and visibility → Limit who can find you by email
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Data sharing — Settings → Data Privacy → Manage your data and activity — opt out of data sharing with third parties
X / Twitter Privacy Settings
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Protected posts — Settings → Privacy and Safety → Audience and Tagging → Protect your posts
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Phone number — Settings → Your Account → Account Information → Remove phone number
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Location — Settings → Privacy and Safety → Location Information → Remove location
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Discoverability — Settings → Privacy and Safety → Discoverability — turn off email and phone discoverability
Also important:
Even with perfect privacy settings data brokers may already hold information scraped from your profiles before you locked them down. Silent Erase sends removal requests to data brokers that hold this historical data automatically.
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Social media lockdown is just one step. Silent Erase removes your data from the broker sites that already hold it.