Facebook has always been considerate of its users and has found that its privacy settings need to be messed up a bit to make things clear and easy to find. To do this, they took the “privacy settings” and mischievously scattered them among the other categories.
“We have redesigned our entire settings menu on mobile devices from top to bottom to make it easier to find. Instead of spreading the settings across almost 20 different screens, they are now accessible from a single location, ”wrote Facebook in a blog post announcing the changes.
Oh sorry – this is from 2018 when they centralized privacy settings to make them easier to find. This is today where the point is to decentralize them to a number of different places.
“Settings are now divided into six broad categories, each of which contains several related settings: Account, Settings, Audience and Visibility, Permissions, Your Information, and Community Standards and Legal Policies… We have unbundled the Privacy Settings category and moved the settings that were previously included. in other categories. “
Pictured: Facebook is unbundling its privacy settings into new categories.
Which of these categories do you think the privacy settings belong to? Facebook “renamed it to better suit people’s mental models,” so it should be obvious. Just use your mental model.
If your answer is “possibly all”, congratulations, you got it! Now if you want to update your privacy settings, all you have to do is go to each of these new categories and sub-categories individually. Each of them could have a crucial switch inside – it’s like a treasure hunt!
Facebook’s settings page, from oldest to newest. what do you prefer? Credit: TechCrunch
We’re joking, but Facebook has also made the item “Privacy Checkup” much more prominent in this update. This “guided review” may allow the company to use dark patterns that discourage users from less desirable (for the company) privacy options, but it certainly goes through many of the more important settings and leaves them to be changed by users.
“We are confident that this new settings page will make it easier for people to visit their settings, find what they were looking for and make the changes they want,” writes Facebook. We’ll all find out one way or another later when the redesign is rolled out for iOS, Android, mobile web, and FB Lite.