How To Hide Your Friend List On Your Facebook Profile

I always say ask and you shall receive… and a friend of mine posed this question to me on Facebook just last night: “How can I hide my Friend List on my profile?”

Others ask me, “Why would I want to hide my Facebook Friend List from “Everyone” or even from my other friends.”

Well, to some Facebook has quickly yet another place for spammers to hijack email addresses and “harvest” friends.

If you’ve been using Facebook for any length of time you probably know what I mean. You accept a friend request from one person that you have a few friends in common with, and the next thing you know you have 200 friends in common with them. These are the folks that send you a friend request hoping you’ll accept so they can then access your friend list and send all of your friends Facebook Friend Invites.

Others who use their Facebook profile for personal reasons only, want to hide their friend list to protect their friends from getting bombarded with friend requests from their other friends.

If you do want to hide your Facebook friends on your profile, there are two ways to hide your Facebook Friend List on your profile:

1. From the Privacy Settings page, follow the View Settings link under the Basic Directory Information section of the Privacy Settings page. Adjust the See My Friend List setting (Screen shots below).

Note that most people get to screen shot 4 shown below and never even notice the option to Customize their Facebook Friend List Settings. It’s only when you click Customize that you can get specific with your settings and choose Friends of Friends, Friends Only, Specific People, or Only Me. At this point, you’ll see that you also have the option to hide your Facebook Friends from specific people (screen shot 5 below).

2. Directly from your profile, click the pencil icon in the Friends box on your profile. Then, click Change Visibility Settings (screen shots below).

If you don’t want to hide your friends and you like displaying your Facebook Friends List, you still have options. When you click on the pencil icon in the Friends box, you have the opportunity to choose how many friends display in the Friends box on your profile. The default is six, but you can change it to 9 or 12. You also have the option to decide which friends get shown in the box. By default, Facebook randomly pulls the friends that appear, but you can control the settings by typing your friend’s names in the Always Show These Friends field.