There are good reasons for hiding your list of Facebook friends on your Facebook public profile.
You’ve seen those posts from your Facebook friends:
“I’ve been hacked! If you get a friend request from me, it’s a fake!”
But, as I’ve written before, this is not a “hack”. Their Facebook account has not been compromised. The scammer has just created a new Facebook account, using your friend’s name and profile picture, and they’re pretending to be your friend. The plan for this scam is that they will send friend requests to the people you are already friends with, and some of those friends will just blindly accept (even though you’re already friends). Then they will try to scam your friends, posing as you in order to take advantage of their trust.
And THAT’S why your list of Facebook friends should be hidden from public view. If the scammer sees that he cannot find out who your friends are and try to contact them, he’ll move on to another Facebook profile to run his little scheme. So, having your Facebook friends hidden saves you AND your friends the hassle of dealing with it.
Here’s how you hide your list of friends. (This is how you do it in Chrome, on a desktop/laptop computer. The process on your phone may look different.)
Go to Facebook, and click the little triangle in the top right corner. Then, click on “Settings and Privacy”:
In the next window, click on Settings:
In the next window, look in the column on the left and click on Privacy:
Now look out to the middle part of that page, and find the section called “How People Find and Contact you”. You’ll see an option named “Who can see your friends list?” – click to Edit that setting:
In the drop-down menu, choose “Only me”:
Now just click “Close” over on the right hand side, and you’re done. There’s no “Save” button needed – Facebook has already saved your preferences.
Now, no one can see your list of Facebook friends except you.
