What Facebook’s latest update means for your privacy settings

(CNN) — Everyone has that friend or family member who unwittingly still posts publicly on Facebook. It’s not that they’re over-sharers, they just haven’t bothered to keep up with the social network’s ever-changing and often confusing privacy settings.
Facebook highlighted some of its minor new and future privacy features on Tuesday, including one aimed squarely at the people left behind by complicated settings.

To counteract that sense of wariness, Facebook is making sure future privacy considerations aren’t just part of a settings screen, but also taken into account by engineers making new features and at the infrastructure level.

“We understand that some people have felt that Facebook privacy has changed too much in the past,” said Mike Nowak, a product manager on Facebook’s privacy team.

Not changing settings ever again isn’t an option, so Facebook is searching for new ways to improve the experience that won’t anger or alienate users. The company has been running extensive surveys to find out what kind of privacy experiences people are having on the site and in the app. It currently runs 4,000 surveys a day in 27 languages.

Squeezing useful information out of these surveys can be difficult. Facebook engineering manager Raylene Yung said people will commonly just write in the word “privacy” when asked what they want to improve. However, enough users have managed to articulate what situations upset them. People said when they share things on Facebook they feel their info is shared with more people than they wanted. Facebook knows giving those people a sense of control is key to keep them from leaving the service.