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Whenever we add a new friend, this activity gets pushed to the newsfeed of a random subset of our friends. This seemingly happens even if our friends list is set to private.

Is there a way to keep our own friending activity private, and it to be pushed out to our friends?

I found also this discussion on facebook: How do I stop my recent friend activity from appearing on my friends' newsfeed? , and it seems that these guys found no solution as for now.

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  • So, i assume it's not possible or..? Isn't not allowing this privacy violation? i thought Facebook had to comply with privacy regulations of the EU or..?
    – Pa_
    Commented May 28, 2013 at 10:08
  • This is relevant: webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/16348/…
    – RHPT
    Commented May 29, 2013 at 3:39
  • Thanks, so i assume the answer to my question is "no", right?
    – Pa_
    Commented May 29, 2013 at 9:46

1 Answer 1

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The other answer linked in the comments says you can remove the stories and the stories themselves match the privacy of the activity

For example, as far as I know if you don't want a 'X is now friends with Y' (where you are 'X') story appearing to your other friends, set the visibility of your friends list such that they can't see it, then they'll only see that 'X is friends with Y' story if they're also friends with Y and can see you on their friends list.

TL;DR - if i can't see your friends list, i can't see stories about who you became friends with unless i can see THEIR friends list and see you on it

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  • Hi, thanks for the answer. Are you sure of this? i have friends who set their friend's list as private, but i still get feeded with "X became friend with Y" news related to this person, and for connections which are not my friends as well..
    – Pa_
    Commented Jun 8, 2013 at 10:25
  • If Xs list is private, but Ys is not, you'll still see 'X is now friends with Y' stories because you're able to see that X was added to Y's list. If X and Y both had private friends lists, as far as I know you'll never see one of those stories
    – Igy
    Commented Jun 8, 2013 at 16:00
  • so you are saying that, in such case, friends of X who are not friends of Y can still see friending updates related to X because Y does not have a private friend's list? It sounds like a pretty absurd behavior, and i wonder why facebook keeps doing these privacy tricks to violate our privacy..
    – Pa_
    Commented Jun 9, 2013 at 12:09
  • I believe that's how it works, but i'm not 100% sure - I don't think it's 'violating' anybody's privacy, if anything it's more consistent than what I think you're suggesting should happen (which is that if user X has a private friends list, i shouldn't be able to see user X when i browser user Y's friends list)
    – Igy
    Commented Jun 9, 2013 at 20:13
  • well I would expect that if you are friend of Y, you should be able to see this event (X getting friend with Y). But if you are friend with X only, you should not be "fed" with this update, because X has a private friend's list. Sure, you should be able to see X in Y's friends list, if Y happens to have a unrestricted profile for, for example, friends of friends.
    – Pa_
    Commented Jun 10, 2013 at 7:34

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