NEW YORK TIMES–Didn’t mean for your boss to see a picture of you on the beach that day you called in sick? Maybe you hadn’t meant for the police to know you were mobilizing your friends to join a public protest? Had you bargained on your high school principal seeing Facebook photographs that they considered so risqué they kicked you off the cheerleading squad?

Sharing online, as social media enthusiasts are learning, can have all sorts of unintended consequences offline.

Now Facebook says it wants to help you get a better grip on what you share. On Tuesday the company unveiled changes to its privacy settings that it says are designed to more clearly show who knows what about your life on the Internet. The changes will take effect Thursday.

Every time you post a picture, update your status or add any other content to your Facebook page, you will be able to more easily specify who can see it: friends, everyone on the Internet, or a customized group. These will be indicated by icons that replace the current, more complicated padlock menu.

What is now called “everyone” in those settings will instead be called “public.” Facebook executives say they want to dispel any doubts about what the setting means. If you click “public,” that means anyone who is online can see it, including perfect strangers – or, worse, parents, prospective employers and your ex-wife’s divorce lawyers.

Similar settings will now appear next to other material you have posted, like your work history or photo albums, so you will no longer need to click to pages full of privacy options to change them.

Chris Cox, vice president for product at Facebook, put it this way: “We want to make this stuff unmistakably clear.”

No doubt the company also wants to diminish the possibility of legislation, investigation or litigation stemming from complicated or confusing privacy settings. And with mounting competition from other social networking sites, namely Google+, which emphasizes more compartmentalized communications to different sets of friends and acquaintances, Facebook is also keen to keep its customers’ trust.

“Your profile should feel like your home on the Web,” the company said in a blog post. “You should never feel like stuff appears there that you don’t want, and you shouldn’t ever wonder who can see anything that shows up there.”

That includes tagged pictures. The site will now let you approve every picture in which you are tagged before it appears on your profile page. No longer will an unflattering or compromising photograph of you show up there without your consent, though the publisher of the photograph can still post it on his or her own page.

The changes point to some of the company’s growing pains, in which mass appeal can sometimes be a bit of a liability. Facebook is used today by 750 million people all over the world, with varying degrees of knowledge about what it means to have a life online. Company officials say they hope the latest changes will demystify privacy settings and ensure that Facebook users are never “surprised,” as Mr. Cox put it, by what others…

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