Use View As to See What You Post to Facebook
He came back – sort of. Facebook has officially revived View As, a way to see what your profile looks like to people other than you. It’s a great privacy tool with some annoying new restrictions.
In its initial incarnation, Facebook’s “View As” option was a great way to double-check if your privacy settings were working as you intended, especially if you were trying to prevent certain people (like your parents) from seeing different aspects. of your life, you would rather they did not. You could see what your profile looks like from the point of view of any of your friends, and you could also see what information you publicly share with any random internet user who stumbles upon your profile.
Sounds great, right? That was until Facebook reported a View As vulnerability that could allow an attacker to hijack your account or log into a number of other websites on your behalf (via Facebook’s single sign-on function). This privacy mess affected at least 50 million users, and Facebook immediately disabled the feature.
Facebook has brought View As back to life – hopefully it’s more secure than before. However, you can only access it on the Facebook app for Android or iOS at the time of this writing, and it is not as powerful as it used to be. You can’t see what specific friends might see on your profile, but you can at least make sure you don’t post information you didn’t want.
iOS
You will find “View As” on your profile page. Navigate there by clicking on the hamburger icon in the lower right corner and clicking “View your profile” at the top. (Or, for quick access, simply click on your profile picture to the left of the What’s In Your Mind status field on the main Facebook screen.)
From there, tap the three-dot icon to the right of the gear icon and the big blue Add Story icon. You will see a small pop-up menu labeled “View As” at the top. Click on it and you will see all the information your Facebook profile page shares with the world.
Android
Bring up your profile by tapping your profile photo to the left of the Add Post field on the Facebook app home screen, or tap the hamburger icon in the top right corner of the Facebook app and select View your profile at the top. You will now see a large View As button to the left of Add to Story in the icon bar below your name and intro text. Click on it to see what your public profile looks like.
Remember to customize what you share
The iOS version with View As doesn’t give you an easy way to go to edit your profile — if you want to start limiting what anyone can see — but you do get a big fat Edit Profile button on Android. when you use the View As option.
I think it’s even faster to edit Facebook settings on a desktop or laptop while you’re holding your phone to check what people are seeing, but that’s just me. However, there is no word on whether “View As” will appear again in the web version of your Facebook profile. I reached out to Facebook for clarification about this feature, but they never responded. Perhaps our friendship is strained.