How To Prevent Games & Apps From Posting To Your Friends

When you play games on Facebook, or use Apps, or login to web site using your Facebook account, you often need to give them permission to make posts on your behalf. But if you don’t want your friends seeing every level you beat or high score you get, there is one simple setting you need to change.

When you connect to any Facebook App (like a game, or a web site) a dialog will be shown to request permission to access your account. If the App is going to post to your news feed, there will be a setting hidden in the lower left. See this example:

By default, the permissions will be either “Public” or “Friends”. Here’s the secret: You can change this to “Only Me” before accepting! That way, the App will still have permission to make posts to your Timeline, but they will never be visible to your friends. If you change this setting, you can be sure that every move you make in a game will not be broadcast to friends who probably don’t care. It won’t affect your game play at all.

Similarly, on web sites you may get a popup like this:

You can change the permission of posts using the same “Only Me” value:

This way, if you post a comment on the site or update some data, there is no chance that the site will announce this to your friends without you realizing it. The only person who will ever see anything the site posts is you.

How Can I Change It For Existing Apps?

Simple. Just navigate to the “Apps” section of your Privacy settings by clicking here: https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications

From there, just click to Edit any App, and you can change the visibility in the settings panel that opens.

There’s nothing wrong with playing Games on Facebook, but if you want to avoid “spamming” your friends with posts that you don’t even want them to see, this simple setting is what you are looking for. I hope you find it helpful!

Please if you would like to pass this tip on to your game-playing friends!

– Matt Kruse, developer of Social Fixer – A free browser plugin that removes Facebook annoyances and adds useful features.