The company confirmed on Thursday that the "Who can look up your Timeline by name?" will be removed from the site allowing everyone's page to be open for searching through the site.

People used to have the option to hide their profiles from others who may be searching for them.

But now strangers and unknown web users can find any profile on the site.

Facebook's chief privacy officer, Michael Richter said in his blog post that he felt the change would make the search function less confusing.

He wrote: "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."

Those using the feature will be told about the change in the forthcoming weeks.

And Facebook has suggested that users become more cautious about the material they post to their page in order to protect their privacy.