When it comes to Facebook, most of us will have a contacts list covering years and even decades of our lives—recent acquaintances among people we've known since high school, neighbors we saw yesterday right next to old family friends we haven't seen since we were much younger.
Whatever you think about Facebook, there's no doubting its reach, and with billions of people on the platform it's important that you're contactable only to the people that you'd like to hear from.
The good news is that Facebook has plenty of tools and options to help you with this, and we've outlined the most important below. This is best done in a desktop web browser, where you can easily access all of the relevant Facebook settings.
If other people can't find you, they can't contact you. If you go to the Facebook Privacy Checkup page and choose How people can find you on Facebook, you can go step by step through the relevant settings. With friend requests, for example, you can allow anyone on Facebook to ask to be connected to you, or limit it to friends of friends—that means only those people who already know someone you're linked to will be able to send you a friend request.
You can also set whether people can find you via your email address and phone number. (If your details are in someone's phone contacts, Facebook might suggest you as a friend to them.) If you want to, you can keep these details private, so no one can find you via these pieces of information.
The final option in this particular section of the Facebook settings lets you decide whether you want your profile to be visible on search engines. If you'd rather your Facebook profile didn't pop up when someone types your name into Google, turn off the toggle switch next to Do you want search engines outside Facebook to link to your profile? before clicking on Next to review your settings.
If other people can't see what you're sharing on Facebook, they can't comment on it or react to it. Every time you post something on the social network, you get what's called an audience selector menu—the drop-down just above the area where you compose the message that you want to post.
From the Facebook Privacy Checkup page on the web, you can click Who can see what you share to choose what the default setting is for this audience selector. If you want your posts to be seen only by a certain group of people, or by everyone on Facebook except for a few contacts, you can configure this here.
There's also a section called Limit past posts. If you click the Limit button underneath it, any older posts that were shared with an audience of friends of friends or indeed anyone on the web will be locked down so only your current Facebook friends can view them.
Anyone you’re Facebook friends with can send you a direct message via Facebook Messenger, so if you don't want this to happen then you need to unfriend or block them. (See below for more details on this.)
Anyone else who's on Facebook can message you too, but these messages don't go directly to your inbox: Instead, they go to a message requests folder. On the desktop interface or inside the mobile app, click or tap your profile picture (top left), then pick Message requests to see these messages. You can reply to these messages to continue the conversation, or ignore or delete them.
From the mobile Messenger app, tap your profile picture then Privacy and Message delivery to decide whether friends of friends and non-friends on Facebook can send you message requests at all.
Friends that you are connected to on Facebook can contact you much more easily than people who aren't. To sever a connection with someone, visit their profile page on Facebook and click Friends then Unfriend.
For people who you absolutely do not want to hear from on Facebook, use the block feature. Blocked individuals won't be able to see what you post on Facebook, they won't be able to tag you, they won't be able to message you, and they won't be able to add you to events. If you block someone, they won't be notified, but they may notice they can no longer be friends with you or get in touch with you.
To block someone, from the Facebook settings page click Blocking, then choose Edit next to Block users. Select Add to Blocked List, then enter the name of the person you no longer want to hear from, then choose Block. You can unblock people if you change your mind, but you'll have to then manually add them as friends again.
