How to prevent someone from not only not contacting me on FB, but also prevent them from even finding my profile or account on FB at all in the first place?
If you find their profile you can block them and they won’t be able to find your profile at all. You don’t have to have any interaction with them before blocking them, or any sort of connection.
If you’re not sure which profile belongs to them, just block every profile with their name.
Leave your profile blank, or set everything to “only me”. Do NOT put your email address in your profile. If they try to contact you on FB, you’ll know what name to block.
Block them. They won’t know you did this until/unless they try to contact you, and will get a message stating so, although that’s not how they phrase it.
Umm - this wouldn’t be ideal either. I don’t want them to find me but don’t want them to know I specifically tried to block them either (for social reasons that would need longer explanation.)
Essentially, don’t want them as friends, but don’t want them to think I regard them as enemies either.
I don’t think you can have it both ways. If you don’t want them to find you, then NOBODY else would be able to find you either - although perhaps that’s not an issue for you?
I’m not aware of a way to cherry-pick (to that extent, so they can’t ever see you) among individuals while also maintaining a quasi-normal activity level on social media, besides blocking.
If you block someone, there is still the possibility that, when they are logged OUT of Facebook, they will be able to see your name and your profile photo if they do a search. Blocking someone only works when they are logged in to Facebook.
If it is absolutely essential that someone not be able to find you on Facebook at all, I suggest you change your account so that your surname is something else – perhaps your middle name. Some of my friends have done this sort of thing for reasons unknown to me. If you are really determined not to be found, you should also remove your profile photo and replace it with a cartoon or other graphic that is not your face.
Like others said, block them. When you block someone they won’t even know that you exist on facebook. They won’t see you in searches, they won’t see if you comment or like something, even on a mutual friend’s page, nothing, you’re gone. The only place you’ll even exist to them is if the two of you have already had a previous, direct, interaction. That is, if one of you wrote on the other’s page etc. That will still show up, but your name will be unclickable.
As Allthegood said (in a grapey way), if the person logs out of facebook, they can still track you down that way. However, there’s still some precautions you can take. I don’t know where the privacy settings are these days, or how they’re worded but look for things like ‘must be logged in to see me’, ‘not search engine indexed’, ‘only accept PMs from friends’ ,<-in fact, you can change quite a few settings to ‘friends’ instead of ‘friends of friends’ or ‘everyone’. You’ll have to decide if you need to do that.
Lastly, change your profile picture to something that’s not you. Take a picture of a sunset or something, then change all your album settings to ‘friends only’ and if no one will care (or you don’t care if anyone notices) change your name.
Doing all that can be a bit of an extreme, but there’s certainly people that do that all the time and they all but disappear from FB.
One last thing, if this is something of real importance (as opposed to ‘I don’t like him and I know he’s gonna send me a friend request’) and you want to temporarily go all the way, disable your profile for a few days.
So, there ya go, it runs the gamut from the basic ‘block them’ all the way to removing your profile for the time being. Keep in mind, as long as your profile is still up, no matter what you do, if they poke around via someone else’s name (ie ‘hey can you look up Velocity on fb’), you’ll still be there.
While blocking is useful, it is not perfect. The other person can create a new account and access your profile with the new account.
If they already know your profile, they can save a link to it so they can still browse it even if you change your name or whatever.
If this person knows who your friends are, they can lookup your friends and then go through their friends lists to find you.
You should set all your profile settings so that only friends can contact/view your info. That will limit what this other person can do with your profile to just viewing your profile picture. Everything else should show up blank.
If all else fails, hire some guys to pay the person a visit and rough him/her up a bit. When they are done they imply another, harsher visit if he/she ever contacts Velocity.
All these responses are ignoring the main issue:
If you want privacy, forget Facebook. If you want Facebook, forget privacy.
Regarding privacy, Facebook is a nightmare, and it’s intentionally made to be that way - invasion of privacy is the reason Facebook exists, not an accident or an oversight.
This.
There was a friend at work who was being stalked by an ex-boyfriend, with the “aid” of Facebook. The above advice is what she received from the security and IT team here. That Facebook was designed and is being run to facilitate you being found and communicated with, not to allow you to remain anonymous.
She ended up deleting all of her information on Facebook and then deleting her account.
Even if they find you in a Facebook search, all they find is your name sans any information whatsoever. Also, they must send a friend request that you have to accept before they can see a single one of your posts or pictures or videos. I’m not understanding the urgency here.
Not to depress you but, if someone really wants to find you, they can do a way more detailed search than Facebook, though it would probably cost them money.
To be fair, most of the information you can find out about a person is because that very person put it there.
If you don’t want an ex stalking you, don’t post where you are. If don’t want people to know how old you are, don’t put your birthday (or at least the year) on your profile. If you don’t want people to know who your relatives are, don’t add them on as ‘aunt’ or ‘brother’. If you don’t want people to know your name, change it. A lot of people, especially teachers IME, use first name/middle name or even something more obscure.
I hate to blame the victim here, but hard not to do so when you tell your ex (or whoever) to stop showing up everywhere you are while you’re posting exactly where you are.
And, as stated, adjust your privacy settings. There’s ways to make it so someone you’re not friends with can see little else than your profile picture and name, both of which can be just about anything.
The exception being any public posts or photos (or friend lists, etc), of course.
It depends on whether your ex being able to easily find you is a minor irritation or a real problem.
If being found is a real problem for you, then permanently deleting your Facebook account (and never making a new one) is your only sane option. Plus potentially a number of other things you might need to do.
If your ex finding you just bothers you but you’ll get over it, then do what you want.