Minors & Privacy
Along with providing tools and settings that allow people to select who they share and connect with, we take additional precautions to help keep young people safe.
We work hard to help keep people on Facebook safe. For minors, we've designed many of our features to remind them of who they're sharing with and to limit interactions with strangers.
For example, we provide minors with specific education about what it means to post publicly. We also protect sensitive information, such as minors' contact info, school and birthday, from appearing in search to a public audience. Additionally, we take steps to remind minors that they should only accept friend requests from people they know.
Like many of our features, we've designed messages to have extra protections for minors. These protections help prevent minors from receiving messages from strangers while allowing them to receive messages from friends, friends of their friends, and other people they may know. Some examples of people who may be able to message a minor are:
- A friend of a friend who includes a minor in a message along with some of their mutual friends
- A member of a group a minor is in who messages them or includes them in a message
- Someone who has their contact information (ex: phone number or email)
Because a friend request may come from someone a minor doesn't have mutual friends with, we provide additional education to remind minors that they should only accept friend requests from people they know (ex: a family relative).
If a minor or adult receives a message that makes them uncomfortable, we recommend reporting the message and blocking the sender.
Learn how to control who can send you friend requests.
Anyone who can see a post may be able to add tags to it. When someone's tagged in a post, the audience of the post may expand to include their friends. Minors and adults can use the Tag Review tool to approve tags people add to their posts before they appear. By default, this feature is on for minors.
Minors and adults can also turn on Timeline Review to review posts they're tagged in before the posts appear on their Timeline. If a minor or anyone else is tagged in something they don't like, they can remove the tag or ask the person to take the post down.