As people become more aware of their online privacy, staying private on the internet has become a big issue. There are many ways to keep your privacy away from prying eyes.

Keeping your contacts private is a simple procedure in Facebook. You will need to login to your account on a desktop browser such as Chrome or Safari. It’s also possible to do the changes from a browser on a mobile device, but changing the settings in the app isn’t possible.

If you use an Android phone then your contacts are automatically saved to Google/Gmail. If you have saved an email address to your Google/Gmail  account it will be backed up and should be in your list of ‘Contacts’. Go to the Google Contacts app on either a computer or mobile device to check.

Backing up your Android contacts is relatively straightforward, especially if you are signed in with a Google account. You can also recover any deleted contacts from the Google Contacts app.

Facebook, LinkedIn and Whatsapp allow you to sync your phone’s address book with their servers to bring your social network contacts in your address book and also to pass them info on your contacts. Now assuming you want to do this, here is some more info on how below.

 If you use Windows Live, Hotmail or Outlook then you will probably have lots of contacts saved in your email’s address book. You can sync your Outlook contacts to any device including iPhone and Android devices.

With many of us using social media as the main tool for staying connected with people, having links to your contacts’ social profiles can be very handy. This means when you browse your address book, you’ll be able to look at a contact and quickly access their Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn account.

If you’re upgrading your iPhone or you want to do a factory reset, it’s pretty straightforward to do a backup and restore contacts on your iPhone address book. There are two simple methods to backup your iPhone contacts using iCloud or iTunes

Having duplicate contacts in Gmail can be annoying, but thankfully Google have made a very handy tool to deduplicate your Gmail contacts.

If you’re making the big step up from a classic Nokia phone to an iPhone you’ll understandably be concerned about losing all your contacts.   There are a few ways to transfer Nokia contacts to iPhone.