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Facebook’s privacy settings have been criticised in the past for being difficult to understand, but these days it’s becoming easier. Here’s how to protect your privacy from people who aren’t your friends although you should note that this won’t stop Facebook from selling information about you to advertisers. The only way to do that is to delete your account.

Click the padlock icon at the top right of your profile page and the first option you’ll see is the Privacy Check-up, a quick way to identify immediate privacy concerns. This lets you check who will see your posts in the future friends or friends of friends, for example as well as disconnecting apps from your account and choosing who can see personal details such as your email, date of birth and hometown. It’s wise to limit these to friends only, rather than friends of friends, so that if one of your friends foolishly adds a dodgy contact, your own data won’t be at risk.

For more in-depth options, go to the full Privacy Settings And Tools page by clicking the lock icon and selecting “See More Settings”. Here, Facebook lays out key details of who has access to your profile page. From here, not only can you restrict your future posts to friends as above, you can also limit who can see your old posts. This will mean status updates, photos and other content you shared in the past publicly will no longer be visible to the world. Facebook will warn you that it’s difficult to undo this, but don’t get nervous: why would you want a stranger to have access to all your old posts?

On this page you can also change who can send you friend requests. If you’re careful about whom you accept, there’s no need to worry; if you’re setting up a privacy policy for someone who’s less likely to be careful, you may want to set this to friends of friends, to cut out requests from complete strangers. You can also change how people can search for you, hiding your email address or phone number, and ban search engines from linking to your timeline, meaning Google won’t find what you post.

Next, click on the Timeline And Tagging settings in the menu to the left. Here, you can specify who can tag you in photos, post on your timeline, and view how your page looks to others. Click “View as” to see how your page would appear to a specific friend or the public – even on strict settings, your name, profile and cover photos, Likes and Groups will always be visible.

Facebook followers are people who aren’t your Friends, but can still see your News Feed. Click Followers on the left-hand menu to ensure this is limited to Friends.

Here you can see which apps are connected to your Facebook account. These apps can see key details such as your name, gender and, in some cases, your list of friends. Clear out any apps that you no longer use. From here you can also turn off Platform, which lets you use Facebook to log in to other websites and lets Facebook collect information about what apps and websites you visit. Click to disable this. Next, under “Apps others use”, click Edit. Here, you can edit what information your friends can share about you when they use third-party apps. The language here is ambiguous: you should untick all the boxes to indicate that other people’s apps should know nothing about you.

Continuing down the left-hand menu, select Adverts. At the moment, Facebook doesn’t give third-party apps the right to use your name in adverts  but it’s clearly considering it for the future. Click Edit to ensure it can’t. You can also opt out of Social Adverts, which show a friend’s name or image next to an advert because they liked its page. Select “No one” to opt out. Lastly, Facebook offers a link to the European Interactive Digital Advertising Alliance. Click through to opt out of Facebook’s behavioural advertising system, so you won’t see ads based on other websites you’ve visited.

The next time you share a comment, link or photo, note the “Friends” box at the bottom next to “Post”. Click that to change who can see your post, perhaps leaving out “Acquaintances” whom you don’t interact with often. You can add someone to your Acquaintances list who’s currently on your Friends list by clicking on the “Friends” box and scrolling down. You can also set a contact as Restricted, so they see only the posts you choose to make public  it’s sort of like unfriending them without the social repercussions.