Science & Tech

This Facebook feature could be potentially very embarrassing

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Picture:
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Facebook boasts 1.79bn monthly active users.

This means your mother, brother, boss and that random man who gets on the same carriage on your way to work every day are all likely to be using the social media website.

Which is why filtering the audience for your posts is so crucial – you don’t want your supervisor to know just how obsessed you are with Marvel, do you?

However, there's a small detail you may not have been aware of when it comes to Facebook's privacy settings.

If you found a particularly clever article, or you’ve shared your friend’s fundraising for Syria page, maximising how many people see the post will have you changing the privacy settings to ‘Public’.

Picture: Facebook/screengrab

However in doing so, you have changed all future posts to 'Public'.

Facebook confirms this on their FAQ’s page:

The tool remembers the audience you shared with the last time you posted something and uses the same audience when you share again unless you change it. For example, if you choose Public for a post, your next post will also be Public unless you change the audience when you post.

When you manually change your privacy settings – whether it’s on an individual post, privacy shortcuts or privacy settings - the alteration will apply to all future posts.

You can check your privacy settings on the right hand side of your post section, or review them with Privacy Checkup, which you can access by clicking the lock icon on the Facebook page.

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