We discuss how to check what photos you’re tagged in that have wide open privacy settings and why you should consider removing those tags, or even better, persuading the uploader to sort out their privacy settings.
When someone uploads a photo of you and you get tagged in that photo, the privacy settings will depend on the settings of the person who uploaded it, and not you.
This means that even if your own privacy settings are set to friends only, this only applies to content that you upload yourself, not others. So if the person who uploaded the photo has their privacy settings wide open (i.e. set to public) then that means the tagged photo of you can be seen by anyone with a Facebook account.
This can mean that other users – people you don’t know – could theoretically gather all of your public photos on the platform. For example scraping tools like the website StalkScan (which we discussed here, though is no longer operational) could be used to easily and effortlessly collect any photo of you which you are tagged in that is set to public.
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For some users, that could feel a little creepy. It is a little creepy.
That’s why we recommend always checking in to see what photos of you are set to public. On Facebook, this can be seen using the Activity Log.
To do this…
On Facebook for desktop, go to your profile and click Activity Log next to your cover photo. Then, on the left hand side click Photos and Videos. Then at the top, next to Shared with:, select Public. This will show a timeline of any photo you’ve uploaded that is public and any photo of you that is set to public.
On the Facebook mobile app, go to your profile, click More… and then Activity Log. Under Category, select Photos and Video, and under Privacy, select Public. This will show a timeline of any photo you’ve uploaded that is public and any photo of you that is set to public.
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You can then scroll down this list to see exactly what public photos of you are out there. With any of these photos, you can remove the tag of yourself, though bear in mind this does not remove the photo and strangers will be able to see it. But removing the tag means the photo is no longer linked to your Facebook account, meaning it would be harder for someone looking to collect photos of you.
Better yet, you can use the opportunity to try and persuade the uploader of the photo to change their privacy settings to friends only, which limits the audience of the photo to only their friends and your friends (and the friends of anyone else tagged in the photo.)
The final, more drastic option, would be to request the uploader remove the photo altogether. Of course this decision would be made depending on the specific photo itself.