How to Hide Likes on Facebook

Your page and your comments are yours and yours alone. So why does Facebook see fit to share this knowledge with the world? Adding a count in the like box for a page with a worthy cause tends to be perfectly fine. You might even want to draw attention to it. But what about the things you love on a personal and private level? Once you like something, everyone who visits that page, or yours, can see it.

"I'm not comfortable with it. I much prefer to keep some things private, including likes.

Some may scoff at the notion of complete privacy on a social media platform. I mean, the whole thing was created in order to share your thoughts with the world. But some things can benefit you by remaining anonymous. Generally speaking, anything considered social stigma can cause you grief so that your friends, family, or complete strangers will take notice. Certainly, if your family and friends can't accept you for you, that's up to them. That, however, is a whole other topic for another article.

What I want to cover is how to hide all your likes on Facebook from anyone but yourself.

If you're not one to make a grand statement and prefer to keep all your tastes to yourself, then you're in luck. Here are some tips and tricks to avoid exposing your personal feelings too much.

Different types of likes on Facebook

First of all, you must understand that there are several types of likes that can be found on Facebook. There are for different categories, such as Movies, TV, Music, Books, Sports Teams, Athletes, Inspirational People, Restaurants, Games, Activities, Interests, Sports, Food , clothing, websites and others. Obviously, there are many places where a similar can appear.

You have the ability to control, at the category level, who can see your likes. This means that you will have to hide all or show all likes in a certain category. There is currently no option to hide individually liked pages. This means that if you like a football page, it will show that you liked a sports page, but you can have it so that the individual team liked does not appear.

A little hokey but that's what Facebook gave us and until there's another way, that's what we're stuck with.

There are also likes that appear on your timeline from friends or strangers. You can also hide them, but like categories, you'll need an all-or-nothing approach for a certain group of people. This means you'll have to adjust who can see what on your timeline rather than likes directly.

First, I'll cover how you can make your tastes a little more private.

Hide your tastes from the public eye

The steps to privatize your personal likes on Facebook are quite simple. To hide your likes:

1. First, log into Facebook with the proper credentials.
   
2. Next, click on your profile avatar/picture located in the bar near the top of the page.
   • The avatar/image will have your display name and will be located to the right of the Groups icon.
     
3. From the profile page, locate the Suite drop-down menu on the bar just below your cover photo.
   
4. Click it Suite drop-down and in the menu, click on Aime.
   
5. Scroll down to your "Like" box and inside the far right banner, locate the Manage button.
   • The Manage The button is represented by a three-dot icon.
     
6. Click the Manage button and from the menu select Change the privacy of your likes.
   
7. A list of categories will appear. To the right of each category is a globe with a drop-down arrow. For each category you want to make private, click the corresponding drop-down list and select Just me.
   • The Just me the icon will be a dimmed padlock. You can also choose to only allow your friends to see your likes by selecting the Friends option.
   • You can also choose specific people to share or hide likes by selecting the custom choice from the list.
     
8. With the privacy level selected for the categories you chose, each should now have the appropriate icon visible. This lets you know it has been set correctly.
   
9. Once you're done editing who can and can't see your likes, click the button close button at the bottom.
   

Your likes in these categories have now been privatized. As mentioned earlier, hiding likes for individual pages is currently not in cards. However, being able to choose different restrictions for each category is still a decent way to maintain some privacy.

Hide your timeline

Another way to remove your likes from the public is to block entire groups of people from seeing what's on your Facebook timeline. To do this:

1. While you're already logged into Facebook, click the drop-down arrow in the top right corner of the page.
   
2. From the menu that appears, select Parameters & Privacy then click Parameters.
   
3. In the left menu, select Profile and marking.
   

From this page, you'll have three different options that revolve around who can see your timeline, who can tag you, and whether you want to review those posts before they go public. This means that any posts you've liked or participated in can be hidden as long as you give the word.

If you back out and select instead Intimité in the left menu, you can edit "Your activity". This means that all past and future posts can be made invisible to the public, to all or some friends, or to everyone but you.

Maybe one day Facebook will add more granular privacy controls for likes where you can hide the fact that you love water polo or are a cat person instead of a dog person. Unfortunately, to this day, we are all forced to use the features that Facebook has provided us.