Facebook Gets Rid of Privacy Option And Makes All Users Searchable

Any change to Facebook, whether it's a tweak in its site design or an overhaul of its privacy settings, generates a groan or two.

In another effort to improve its users' experience on the social network, Facebook is getting rid of an old and sometimes glitch-prone privacy option that will now render every Facebook user searchable to any other user.

The old privacy setting -- called "Who can look up your Timeline by name?" -- gave users the option to not appear in Facebook search results. If Mark Zuckerberg himself wanted to keep all Facebook users from looking up his Timeline and activity via the Facebook search bar, he could toggle the setting so that only friends, or friends of friends, could do so.

However, according to Facebook's Chief Privacy Officer Michael Richter, that led to some problems with the search function itself. "People told us that they found it confusing when they tried looking for someone who they knew personally and couldn't find them in search results," he said in a statement. Facebook is phasing out this privacy option and will make all users accessible via the search bar.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/facebook-makes-users-searchable/story?id=20543155