Facebook adjusts the visibility of personal details displayed about platform users

After years of a strategy to encourage users to add as much detail as possible to their Facebook profile, Meta seems to have concluded that disclosing too much sensitive information could be to that person’s disadvantage.

Presumably anticipating new class action lawsuits and the “danger” of hefty fines, Meta decided to hide from the “About” section of the Facebook profile that information that could later be used against users.

Facebook is removing religious views and ‘interested in’ info from profiles from 1 December 2022 pic.twitter.com/SKjSrtwUwm

– Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) November 16, 2022

This will soon mean that details such as sexual orientation, political beliefs and religion will no longer be visible, as u were ticked off when filling in your Facebook profile. The list of details deemed too “risky” to be publicly displayed includes your home address, no matter how incomplete it was filled in. It remains to be seen whether Meta will also hide the phone number that some users still have publicly displayed on their Facebook profile, as this can also be used to harass the person.

According to Meta, the change is part of an ongoing effort to “make Facebook easier to navigate and use.” It’s unclear whether the announced changes foreshadow other changes to the design of profile pages, or simply that Facebook’s administrator decided to do a little “clean up” by removing those sections that most users leave blank anyway.

Users who have information about to be hidden attached to their public Facebook profile will be informed in advance about the change prepared by Meta for 1 December.