Facebook to simplify privacy controls

Facebook is streamlining its privacy controls in a bid to make it easier for people to ask friends to remove photos of themselves from the site.

The changes, to be rolled out in the coming weeks, include:

• A request and removal tool which lets you ask someone to remove multiple tagged photos photos of yourself from Facebook. (There is no way to prevent someone from tagging you altogether in the first place, though -- only the ability to avoid that tag from being shared with your friends via your timeline.)
• Privacy shortcuts, so controls can be accessed from every page rather than in a sub-menu.
• Permission for apps to access or post information will happen in two stages (for most apps).

• Contextual messages that tell you what you're doing on Facebook. For example, if you hide a post on your timeline, Facebook may alert you to the fact that the post may still appear on people's news feeds or elsewhere on Facebook (say, if you posted a link that was publicly accessible and later shared by someone else on their own timeline).

The new privacy controls have been broadly welcomed, but there is some concern over the removal of one tool. Security firm Sophos says that the removal of the "who can look up my timeline by name" setting is a step in the wrong direction, as there should be a way to avoid being found on the site altogether.

In a blog outlining the changes, Samuel Lessin wrote that the feature was only used by a small percentage of people and "didn't prevent people from finding others in many other ways across the site". He wrote: "Because of the limited nature of the setting, we removed it for people who weren't using it, and have built new, contexual tools, along with education about how to use them."

Sophos says that the removal of the tool was a missed opportunity."If the original setting was limited in scope... why not rework it so as to actually protect people's privacy and give them the right to not be found?"