Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg sent an open letter to the sites 350 million users about the modifications that have been made to the privacy policies of the world’s most popular social networking website.

Facebook's current privacy model revolves around networks that could include schools and companies, which worked well when Facebook was mostly for students who wanted to share content with fellow students, Zuckerberg wrote.

Over time people also asked us to add networks for companies and regions as well. Today we even have networks for some entire countries, like India and China. However, as Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and we've concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy, he wrote.

Almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us. If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information.

Facebook will now remove regional networks in order to create simpler privacy control and give users the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content users create or upload, according to Zuckerberg.

Users of the social networking utility will be asked to review and update their privacy settings. “The best way for you to find the right settings is to read through all your options and customize them for yourself. I encourage you to do this and consider who you’re sharing with online,” Zuckerberg advises.

Plans to revamp the privacy settings began in July but the agreed upon changes were only rolled out this week.