Facebook is a classic “love-hate” relationship. Love
the communication with family and friends. Hate all the nonsense
clogging up the news feed. Fortunately, there are a few really easy
steps you can take to control your Facebook experience.
1. Auto-playing videos
A
year ago, Facebook decided that its users wanted any videos in the News
Feed to start playing automatically when they scrolled past them.
Wrong. Facebook users were understandably upset. Not only was it
annoying to suddenly get blasted with sound, videos use up cellular data
on mobile gadgets.
Turning
off auto-playing video is simple. For the Facebook website, go to your
Facebook profile. Click the downward arrow in the upper-right corner and
select "Settings." At the bottom of the left column, click "Videos."
Then next to "Auto-Play Videos," choose "Off."
In
Android, open the Facebook app and tap the icon with the three
horizontal lines to the left. Then scroll down to "App Settings" and tap
"Autoplay." You can set it to play "On Mobile Data and Wi-Fi
Connections," "On Wi-Fi Connections Only," or, my personal favorite,
"Never Autoplay Videos."
For iOS, open your
Facebook app and at the bottom-right corner tap "More." Scroll down and
tap "Settings" and then "Account Settings." Find and tap "Videos and
Photos" and under Video Settings tap "Autoplay." You can set it to play
"On Mobile Data and Wi-Fi Connections," "On Wi-Fi Connections Only," or
"Never Autoplay Videos."
Auto-playing videos aren't the only things eating up your cellular data. Learn about four more ways your cellular data gets drained and how to stop them.
2. App notifications
Tired
of a Facebook game app you installed years ago still sending you
notifications every other minute? You can easily turn off app
notifications if you know where to look. In fact, you'll probably want
to remove most of your apps entirely because they can share your
information with the app developers.
To find your
installed apps, go to your Facebook profile and click the downward arrow
in the upper-right corner. Select "Settings" and in the left column
click "Apps." You'll see every app you've ever installed on the left.
Hover
over an app and click the pencil icon to edit its properties. You can
choose what information it can know about you and if it can send you
notifications. You'll want to change it to only get the most basic
information possible and change Notifications to "No."
If
you want to delete the app, hover over it and click the "X" icon. While
this won't delete any information that it has previously gathered on
you, it will stop it from collecting more. Learn more about how apps collect information and how to better protect your privacy.
3. Block News Feed posts you don't want to see
Do
you have friends who post dozens of things on Facebook every day, but
it's mostly shares from political, potty humor or inspiration pages? You
don't want to block your friend entirely, but you'd rather not see
those posts you don't care about.
If your friend
is constantly sharing from the same pages, you can actually block those
pages specifically. Click the downward arrow in the upper-right corner
of the post, and select "Hide all from ..." and you won't see any more
posts from those pages.
If you just want to stop
seeing posts from your friend without un-friending them, click the
downward arrow and select "Unfollow ..." You can refollow them later by
going to your Facebook profile, clicking the downward arrow in the
upper-right corner and selecting "News Feed Preferences." Then click
"Reconnect with people you unfollowed" and choose people you want to
re-follow and click "Done."
