Facebook released a post on their privacy blog Thursday stating the removal of an old setting called "Who can look up your Timeline by name?" along with new controls for managing content on Facebook.
According to NBC News, Facebook removed this privacy setting last year for most of the users who utilized the setting.
"The search setting was removed last year for people who weren't using it," Michael Richter, Chief Privacy Officer posted on the blog. "For the small percentage of people still using the setting, they will see reminders about it being removed in the coming weeks."
This setting allowed a user to control whether their name would appear when other users searched for them. If a user set the privacy setting to "no one" then the user profile would not appear when others searched for that user by name, NBC reported.
A user can still be found by tagged pictures, or posts, or by searching through other user profile's friend network; the setting didn't really keep user's timeline private, and prevented friends from quickly searching for each other, according to Facebook.
Facebook said users can protect their privacy by limiting the audience for each item they post about themselves with the new controls for managing the conent on user pages. They can also block individual users from seeing their profiles in a search. The company said the setting, which they began to remove last year, may have given its users a false sense of security, because people could still find any post or photo where their name or tag appeared.
Nicky Jackson Colaco, a member of the Facebook Privacy team told CNET in an interview last December when the privacy setting was first removed that the reason for the change was a false sense of security.
"Our concern, quite frankly, is that people think it provides a level of security, but it actually doesn't," Nicky Jackson Colaco, a member of the Facebook Privacy team, told CNET.
