Facebook Is Quietly Removing Option To Be Unsearchable By Name

The huge social network company Facebook is making a lot of changes in both Security and privacy for the users beside the new features that was added from a few days like the Graph Search. Today we’ve got a new report saying that Facebook is going to quietly remove the ‘Who can look up your Timeline by name’ privacy option that allowed you to make it so your profile could not be found via search.

From Michael Richter, Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer:

“Last year we announced the removal of an old setting called “Who can look up your Timeline by name?” along with new controls for managing content on Facebook.
The search setting was removed last year for people who weren’t using it. For the small percentage of people still using the setting, they will see reminders about it being removed in the coming weeks.
Whether you’ve been using the setting or not, the best way to control what people can find about you on Facebook is to choose who can see the individual things you share.”

Maybe you are asking yourself why Facebook is removing this privacy feature ? Two reasons. For one, it made the new Graph search function feel broken, as users would complain that they could not find users that they met through Facebook Groups, etc.

The second, likely more important reason is that the feature was very misleading. Users thought that with it enabled, strangers wouldn’t be able to find their profile, but that wasn’t the case—think photo tags, Likes, Shares, etc.