Over the weekend, Facebook began rolling out a new interface that gives members much more direct control over who can see what they post, as well as when they’re tagged by others. Some of the options were already available, but you had to click through multiple pages and pop-ups to use them. There are also two new important options.

There are three major changes to Facebook’s UI. First, whenever you post an update or share a photo or link, there’s a button at the lower right of the posting box that lets you pop up a menu to change the privacy settings for that one post. By default, posts are Public, which means any Facebook user can see them. Click the button labeled Public (it has a world-globe icon to its left), and up pops a menu with three options: Public, Friends, and Custom. If you change the setting to Friends, only your direct Facebook friends – not friends of friends – will be able to see the post. If you select Custom, a dialog box pops up that lets you add specific people, or choose Friends of Friends, or add a Facebook network to which you belong. You can also type in the names of specific people from whom to hide the post – for example, when planning a surprise party.

Next, are you tired of people tagging you in photos? Now you can configure Facebook to require your approval before tagged photos and posts appear on your profile page. Friends can still tag you, but the photos will be harder to find (as always, you can go to the photo and remove the tag completely.) To turn on the new setting, click Account -> Privacy Settings in Facebook’s upper right corner. On the Privacy Settings page that appears, scroll down to How Tags Work and click Edit Settings. A popup dialog will appear whose first entry is labeled Profile Review, the new feature. Click Edit and punch Turn On Profile Review. Then click Done on the settings dialog.

From then on, when someone tags you on Facebook, you’ll get a notification as before. Click the notification to go to a Pending Posts page, where you can approve or deny whether each individual post in which you have been tagged will appear on your profile. But you’ll still see every single tagged photo if you click on Photos on your own profile page, so you can hunt them down later.

Finally, you can now change your mind about a post’s visibility after you’ve posted it. Before, you only had the option to delete the post and start over. Now, when your roll your cursor over one of your previous posts, a button just like the one described above appears in its upper right corner. Click the button to choose Public, Friends, or Custom.

Seeing the new controls in action makes them easy to understand, so you might want to check out Facebook’s two-minute video that shows how to use each of these three features. Some of the labels in this video are slightly different from the version that Facebook eventually rolled out, but they’re close enough that you’ll be able to follow the instructions without confusion.