Responding to mounting pressure from users and privacy groups, Facebook introduced a new, simplified version of its privacy controls on Wednesday.
Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s founder and chief executive, said the revised settings would make it easier for users to understand how much of their personal information was publicly accessible on the Web.
“The settings have gotten complex, and it has become hard for people to use them to effectively control their settings,” said Mr. Zuckerberg at a press event at Facebook headquarters. “We wanted to make it really easy to change privacy in just a couple of clicks.” Facebook said it would give its users a simple control to determine whether their information was visible to only friends, friends of friends or everyone on the Internet. Those settings will be applied retroactively to everything users have published on Facebook in the past.
In addition, Facebook said it was changing its directory of users to show only minimal information when people search for others, like the name, profile picture and gender. It had earlier required users to make more of their information public.