Last year Facebook announced the removal of an old setting called “Who can look up your Timeline by name?” along with new controls for managing content on Facebook.
The search setting was removed last year for people who Sren’t using it. The small percentage of people still using the setting, they will see reminders about it being removed in the coming weeks.
Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Michael Richter explains why the now-defunct privacy feature wasn’t really that good of a privacy feature anyway.
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. 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.
The setting also made Facebook’s search feature feel broken at times. For example, 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, or when two people were in a Facebook Group and then couldn’t find each other through search.