Facebook To Retire “Who Can Look Up My Timeline By Name?” Search Setting For All Users

As of today, Facebook announced that it is completing the removal of its “Who can look up my timeline by name?” search setting. Users who still have access to it will begin seeing a reminder below their Facebook search bar that the setting is being retired.

Last December, Facebook announced it was replacing the search setting with new controls for users to manage their content. According to Facebook, the “Who can look up my timeline by name?” setting was automatically retired for users who were no longer taking advantage of it, with the “small percentage of people” still using the search setting able to access it for a limited amount of time.

Now, that “small percentage” of users will begin seeing the following reminder:

The “Who look up my timeline by name?” setting allowed users to control if they could be found when their name was typed into the search bar. With the introduction of Facebook’s Graph Search, the company said the search setting no longer fit the site’s advanced search capabilities:

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.

To better control who can see your content, Facebook says users should select the audience for each individual post by using the audience drop-down menu on the bottom right-hand corner of the Facebook post box. In the announcement, Facebook claims users who share posts publicly will begin seeing a reminder that their posts can be seen by anyone unless they change the audience settings for each individual post.

Facebook offered further recommendations for controlling viewership of previously posted content, advising users to visit their privacy settings page and limit the audience for posts shared in the past.

To be more effective at managing content, Facebook says users should only share posts with the people they want to see it, frequently visit their Activity Log to review what’s being shared, and ask friends to delete content they don’t want shared (either by reaching out to them directly or using Facebook’s reporting feature in the Activity Log).