Facebook, ever attentive of its users, decided that its privacy settings needed a reorganization to make things more clear and accessible. To that aim, they’ve distributed the “privacy settings” settings among the other categories in a nefarious manner.
“On mobile devices, we’ve overhauled our whole settings menu from top to bottom to make things easier to discover.
In a blog post announcing the changes, Facebook writes, “Instead of having settings strewn across roughly 20 separate screens, they’re now available from a single spot.”
Sorry, but it was from 2018, when they centralized privacy settings to make them more accessible. This is the one from today about dispersing them across a number of locations.
“Account, Preferences, Audience and Visibility, Permissions, Your Information, and Community Standards and Legal Policies are now grouped into six broad categories, each containing several related settings: Account, Preferences, Audience and Visibility, Permissions, Your Information, and Community Standards and Legal Policies…
The Privacy Options category has been de-bundled, and the settings that were previously contained within it have been transferred to other categories.”
Do you think privacy settings belong in one of those categories? It should be evident that Facebook “renamed them to more closely reflect people’s mental models.” Simply apply your mental model.
Congratulations if your answer is “all of them, theoretically.”
All you have to do now is visit each of these new categories and subcategories separately to alter your privacy settings. It’s like a treasure hunt, because any of them could contain a crucial toggle!
We laugh, but in this update, Facebook made the “Privacy Checkup” item much more apparent.
This “guided review” may allow the firm to use dark patterns to entice users away from less desirable (for the company) privacy choices, but it does go through many of the more critical settings and allows users to modify them.
Facebook adds, “We’re optimistic that this redesigned settings page will make it easier for individuals to access their settings, locate what they’re looking for, and make the adjustments they want.”
When the makeover for iOS, Android, mobile web, and Facebook Lite goes live later today, we’ll all know one way or another.
