Not everybody wants to reach that 5K friend milestone on Facebook. As a matter of fact, constantly getting friend requests from strangers can become quite annoying. Some of those users may have decided to send you a friend request after Facebook suggested they should add you as a friend. Well, if you want to stop the platform from suggesting you as a friend to anyone, you need to tweak your account privacy settings.
How Do I Prevent Facebook from Suggesting Me to Others?
Facebook doesn’t have a built-in option that allows you to remove your profile from the People you may know section of other users. But you can edit your privacy settings to appear as rarely as possible under that section.
Decide How People Can Find You
- Login to your account, click on the drop-down menu (upper right-hand corner), and select Settings & Privacy.
- Then go to Privacy settings and select How people can find and contact you.
- Edit your settings so that people can’t look you up using your email address or phone number.
- Then prevent search engines from linking to your profile.
Additionally, you can also change the “Who can send me friend requests” settings and select Friends of friends. In this manner, people who are not friends of your friends can’t add you to their friend’s list. They can only follow you. The good news is that doing so should keep you from appearing under “People you may know.”
Block “People You May Know” Notifications
After you did all that, go to your Facebook settings and select Notifications. Scroll down to People you may know. Toggle off the option to prevent Facebook from sending you “People you may know” notifications.
Disable Your Location
Facebook might also be using your current location to suggest new friends to you. Go to your account settings, scroll down to Privacy and select Location. Then go to Location Access and disable this option.
How Can I Stop Facebook from Suggesting My Friends to My Other Friends?
If you don’t like the idea of Facebook suggesting your friends to your other friends, make sure other people can’t see your friend list. That should decrease the frequency with which the platform makes those suggestions. However, keep in mind that you can’t block these suggestions completely.
Conclusion
While you can’t permanently stop Facebook from suggesting your user profile to other users, you can tweak your privacy settings to control better who can find you on the platform. If you’ve got any additional tips and tricks you’d like to share with us on this topic, please drop us a comment below.
Giovanni Fiorito says
How can I stop a friend annoying me that
Facebook notify her that I open Facebook and
Messenger page ! can I use Facebook and messenger private , becoming very annoying
lately .
jk jauhari says
After doing all the above, I still get hundreds of people you may know. It appears that face book doesn’t take no for any notification.
Prue Moodie says
Thank you! I’m very private. I just opened an account with FB only in order to use the Marketplace function. I’ve disabled everything I could in “How people can find and contact you” and “Who can send me requests”. Under “Notifications” I’ve disabled everything except two things related to Marketplace (“Allow notifications on Facebook” and “SMS”). I’m not familiar enough with FB or Marketplace to know what other messaging functions I need, though. Any tips on what I need to turn back on would be gratefully received. You probably won’t be able to contact me on FB because I’ve turned everything off (!) But feel free to respond (if you have time) to the email below. Thanks again for your incredibly valuable advice for a disclosure-phobic person. Prue
Zenax says
How to make my account private