Facebook is pretty good when it comes to letting you know how private or otherwise your posts might be.
You’ve probably been asked to review your settings at some point, and felt confident that you knew whether your boss, old teachers and general public could see all the shameful secrets you posted about.
But there is an alarming possibility that you might have been posting loads of public stuff without realising.
It could have happened if you manually changed the setting of a particular post so that it had a wider reach than the things you normally put up.
You might have thought that it would apply just to that one post – but in fact, changing the setting of just one post like that becomes the default setting on anything you post in future.
According to Facebook: ‘You can manage the privacy of things you share by using the audience selector right where you post. This control remembers your selection so future posts will be shared with the same audience unless you change it.’
But you might not get a notification that it will apply to all future posts when you change the setting of just one.
That’s why people have been caught out by posting publicly when they weren’t aware.
Give it a check in the right hand corner of your post to see if it is set to friends, private or public.