How to secure your profile picture on Facebook

Facebook has begun rolling out a new feature that's aimed at securing users' profile picture from being misused. The functionality is called 'profile picture guard'. It's disabled by default, but you can easily enable it if you need more control on who can download/share your Facebook profile picture.

In this article, we will quickly discuss the basics of this feature, as well as how to enable it. Please note that all steps/instructions mentioned in this tutorial have been tested on a Marshmallow-powered Nexus 5 smartphone.

How to secure your Facebook profile picture

As per the company, the 'profile picture guard' feature - when enabled - will have the following affects:

  • Your profile pic will become non downloadable as well as non sharable for others.
  • Those who are not your friends on Facebook won’t be able to tag anyone, including themselves, in your profile image.
  • Others won't be able to take screenshots of your profile picture, something which is currently limited to Android devices only.

To enable the picture protection guard, tap on your profile picture, and then tap the Turn on profile picture guard option. Once you enable the guard, a blue border and shied will appear on the profile picture, indicating that the protection is on. Now, just tap Save to save the setting.

facebook-profile-pic-guard

To disable the protection guard, tap on your profile picture, and tap the turn off Profile picture guard option. The feature is currently being rolled out in India, although Facebook says other regions would also get it soon.