Few days back i wrote about how Facebook changed privacy settings on its own. There was so much fury by the users over the new public availability of friends to the public view with new settings and no way you can change it. It seems that Facebook backtracked once again as it happened last year too.

In a blog post on Facebook official blog, it is announced that now you can change your friends list visibility as per your needs and you can even hide it from public access by changing some settings. Here’s what the update on the blog says :

In response to your feedback, we’ve improved the Friend List visibility option described below. Now when you uncheck the “Show my friends on my profile” option in the Friends box on your profile, your Friend List won’t appear on your profile regardless of whether people are viewing it while logged into Facebook or logged out. This information is still publicly available, however, and can be accessed by applications. Thanks again for your comments and suggestions.

Here’s how you can hide your Facebook friends from public view.

1. Click on Profile on the blue bar a the top of the screen after you login to facebook:

2. Scroll down to the beginning of your Facebook friends  and click on the pencil to the right of the word Friends:

3. Uncheck the box that says “Show Friend list to everyone”:

Image Credits : CNET [via]

Just changing this small setting will make your Facebook friends  invisible from public view and search engines.