You’ve heard a lot about Facebook’s privacy woes in the past couple of weeks — and I’ve done my best to keep you up to speed on what you need to do to keep your data safe from prying eyes — and now Facebook totally revamped its own privacy and security tools to make it easier than ever to remove private data from your account.
Here’s everything that Facebook changed, and what it means for you:
All-New Settings Navigation
Gone is the confusing library of settings prompts and in their place is a new, easy-to-navigate menu system that shows you exactly where you need to go to control the most important security features of your account. You can see both the old and new settings menus above, and it’s obvious how much clearer it now is.
“We’ve redesigned our entire settings menu on mobile devices from top to bottom to make things easier to find,” Facebook says. “Instead of having settings spread across nearly 20 different screens, they’re now accessible from a single place.”
Good work, Facebook!
New Privacy Shortcuts
Instead of having to hunt down settings for ads, posts, and friends in different areas of the app, they’re now all in one place under the Privacy Shortcuts bar. You can tweak what kinds of ads you see, whether advertisers can use your information to make personalized (aka targeted!) ads for you, and customize exactly who sees the information you put on Facebook.
Facebook says this new privacy center lets you “control your data in just a few taps, with clearer explanations of how our controls work,” which is a welcome change for a confusing system.
New Tool: Access Your Information
This is the biggest change of them all. This all-new tool is like a one-stop shop of every bit of information you’ve ever posted to Facebook, including all your interests, personal details, photos, posts, check-ins, comments, friends, and even your reactions to other people’s posts. You can browse all of this information whenever you want, or tell Facebook to completely forget it for the first time ever.
Prior to this, you had to delete your entire Facebook account to make huge chunks of your info disappear, but now you can pick and choose individual items or whole categories of info and remove them in an instant. It’s the ultimate Facebook scrubber, and it’s been a long time coming.
Facebook hasn’t announced the date that these new tools will be available, but says they will be launching them very soon, so keep your eyes peeled for an app update. In the meantime, you can still go through and remove third party app access and clean up your privacy settings with this handy guide.