How to Prevent Facebook from Publishing Recent Activity in News Feeds

How to keep Facebook from publishing activity in News Feed

The News Feed feature on Facebook allows you to keep up with all of your friends' activities on Facebook. At the same time this feature allows them to see your recent activity on Facebook. As the number of features, applications, and things you can do on Facebook has increased so has the amount of updates your friends see in the News Feed.

Whenever you post photos, videos, links, or notes this is published in all of your friends' news feed displays. Whenever you comment on something, "Like" or become a fan of something, join a group, or write on someone's wall these actions are also published. Finally whenever you use an application on Facebook or through a linked website, the action is published on Facebook for your friends to see in real time.

While this feature can be extremely useful at times it can also be a bit overwhelming to your friends on Facebook especially if you update often. In addition privacy concerns and issues may leave you feeling a bit too exposed on Facebook with every action on Facebook being reported to all friends and family on the social networking site. In addition if your privacy settings aren't set from the default, essentially everyone on your networks and friends of friends can see your activity if they check your profile and other users from the larger Facebook community may also be able to see the News Feed.

Fortunately you can change the settings to prevent the News Feed from displaying various activities on Facebook by customizing the Application settings. You have to individually disable news feed posting for each application and this includes photo settings, link settings, video settings, and group settings. Wall posts, since they are comments made directly to another friend's Facebook page, are visible to both that friend and anyone who views their Facebook page based on your friend's settings.

Click on the "Account" tab in the top right of the main screen once you log on to Facebook.

Select the "Application Settings" link under the list of options and you'll see a list of the recent applications you've used.

Click on "Edit settings" next to the application or Facebook activity you want to prevent from being displayed in the News Feed whenever you use the application.

Go to the "Additional permissions" tab in the window that appears and deselect the check box next to "Publish Content to my Wall" or "Publish in News Feed." Click "Okay" to confirm the change.

Repeat this for any application including photo posting and group activity that you want to prevent from appearing in the News Feed. This will not prevent friends from seeing the activity on your Facebook page; it merely prevents the "news" from appearing in the feed. You can adjust who can and can't see certain application updates or activities under the "Edit Settings" option for each application.

Note that not all applications have this option; for example some third party applications may require you to change the publish setting within their website independent of Facebook.