Over the past five months, Facebook has given and taken away controls to protect user's privacy, with varying degrees of success. However, the flip-flop moves have frustrated and baffled members so on Wednesday, the site again tweaked tools so that member information is private, hoping this time to keep things simple.

The company has six levels of transparency tools allowing members to choose the level of shared information, which can be open or limited. In addition, regional networks have been given the heave-ho.

Chris Kelly, Facebook's chief privacy officer, acknowledged on the company's blog that Facebook has been trying to streamline privacy options.

"We'll remove overlapping settings to reduce confusion," he wrote. "When we add new features to Facebook, we usually include a corresponding privacy setting. While this has helped give some people more individualized controls over particular features, the compounding effect of more and more settings has made controlling privacy on Facebook too complicated."

To be sure, Facebook has grown enormously and privacy controls have had to play catch-up as more and more people sign up to be members. U.S. Facebook users collectively stayed on the site for a total of 13.9 billion minutes in April, according to a June report from Nielsen Online, a whopping 700 percent climb from 1.7 billion minutes in the year-ago period.