Facebook to remove privacy setting blocking users from timeline search

Facebook is removing a privacy setting, that allowed users to be unsearchable if they had blocked their timeline.

The social network has notified those who had hidden themselves that they would be searchable and has deleted the option from those who had not used it in December.

The network is also starting to push everyone to use privacy controls on each type of content they shared, but there was no one-click opt out of Facebook search.

The feature is likely to have been misunderstood by lots of users and at first sight one might assume it meant that strangers could not find users' profile.

However, that was incorrect and there had been lots of ways to navigate to users' profile, like clicking your name on a photo one was tagged in, finding one's name in a friend's friend's list, and others.

With the introduction of Graph Search, the ways in which users profiled could be searched had grown exponentially and basically every bit of personal information (and soon the content users posted) could bring them up in a search.

If a user publicly listed that they lived in New York, a Graph Search for ''People who live in New York'' could lead someone to their profile.

The search setting was removed last year for people who were not using it and those who were using settings would see reminders about it being removed in the coming weeks. Facebook said this only applied to a "small percentage" of users.

"The setting was created when Facebook was a simple directory of profiles and it was very limited. For example, it didn't prevent people from navigating to your Timeline by clicking your name in a story in News Feed, or from a mutual friend's Timeline," Facebook said in a blog post.

"Today, people can also search Facebook using Graph Search (for example, 'People who live in Seattle,') making it even more important to control the privacy of the things you share rather than how people get to your Timeline."

Facebook said the setting made the search feature feel broken at times, and a number of people found it confusing whey they tried to look for someone who they knew personally and could not find them in search results.

Facebook added that whether users had been using the setting or not, the best way to control what they could find about themselves on Facebook was to choose who could see the individual items they shared.