Short version up front, because I hate articles that make you scroll for the payoff.
A 2022 version of this page listed twelve "hidden gems" in Facebook and told you which left-menu item to click for each. Checked against dated evidence, almost none of those twelve were actually taken away. Two were already dead when the article was published — Nearby Friends had been switched off after 31 May 2022 and the Facebook Gaming app stopped working on 28 Oct 2022, both before that December. Two more were described by names Facebook had already retired: "On This Day" had been folded into a Memories page in June 2018, "See First" rebranded Favorites in March 2021. The rest still exist. Marketplace, Groups, Events, Saved, Dating, Live, the video tab — all there.
So this isn't a story about withdrawal. I've written the withdrawal version elsewhere on this site, about X, where capability was removed outright and some of it sold back behind a subscription, and the repricing version about YouTube, where almost nothing was withdrawn but using it properly now costs rent. Facebook is a third thing: the features are still there and your settings aren't. You can switch the feed to Most Recent; it goes back. You can find the privacy control; it moves. The load-bearing fact in this whole piece is that in October 2025 a Dutch court had to order Meta to make a user's choice of feed *stick*, and in March 2026 an appeals court upheld that order. Not to add the feature. The feature existed. To stop the product quietly un-choosing it.
That is also why "lesser-known Facebook features" became a self-fulfilling phrase. Nothing was hidden from you in the conspiratorial sense. It just got moved, renamed, demoted a menu layer and reset to the house default often enough that only people who go looking every year know where anything is.
One note on method. I described no screen from memory — that is the exact failure this piece replaces — and facebook.com/help and m.facebook.com/help both return "Sorry, something went wrong" to anything that isn't a signed-in browser, so the help centre was unavailable throughout. What was available turned out to be better: Meta's dated newsroom posts, developers.facebook.com, Meta's SEC filings, the European Commission's own pages, and court reporting. Where the only source was an undated SEO page I left the claim out and said so at the end.
The part the original got wrong, grouped by how it got wrong
Already gone when it shipped. Nearby Friends, with Weather Alerts, Location History and Background Location, was switched off after 31 May 2022 and the collected location data deleted by 1 Aug 2022; Meta cited low usage. The standalone Facebook Gaming app left the app stores and stopped working on 28 Oct 2022, gaming content moving into a tab in the main app; the "join tournaments" part of the old description I could not verify anywhere current.
Described by names Facebook had already dropped. "On This Day" stopped being the thing you clicked when Facebook launched a broader Memories page on 11 June 2018 and absorbed it as one section; the left-menu bookmark was replaced. "See First" was rebranded Favorites around March 2021, the settings moving into one list capped at 30 friends and Pages, groups not allowed, existing choices migrated in — so the original's instruction was about twenty-one months stale on the day it ran. "Facebook Watch", described there as a service for watching TV shows and movies, became the "Video" tab in July 2023, which Meta frames as Reels, long-form and Live in one personalised vertical feed. Not the product the 2022 copy was selling.
Still there, materially changed. Live Video survives, but since 19 Feb 2025 new broadcasts are replayable, downloadable and shareable for 30 days and then removed, older videos taken down in phases with a notification and an option to delay. Meta's reasoning is that nearly all live views happen in the first weeks. Fair enough as a storage argument; it also means anyone who treated Facebook Live as an archive had an archive that quietly stopped being one. Marketplace survives and carries the largest regulatory finding here: on 14 Nov 2024 the European Commission fined Meta €797.72 million for tying Marketplace to Facebook and imposing unfair terms on rival classified-ads services, and ordered the conduct to stop. Groups survive minus pieces — chats inside Groups went read-only and then away on 22 Aug 2019, audio rooms in 2023, and in September 2025 admins were being notified that Community Chats, launched in 2022, were "going away" too. Fundraisers survive in some form, but Facebook Payments International told charities that fundraising tools would no longer be available for any charity in the European Economic Area from 1 July 2024, in a notice that also referred to personal fundraising having already ended.
Still there, no verified change. Saved, Events, Dating, and Groups and Marketplace as products. Dating actually got invested in: an AI dating assistant and a weekly algorithm-chosen "Meet Cute" match, announced around 23 Sept 2025, US and Canada first.
Twelve items, two dead on arrival, two misnamed on arrival, none withdrawn since. More interesting than a list of tombstones, because it means what made the 2022 article useless wasn't Facebook deleting features. It was Facebook moving them.
The settings don't stick, and a court has now said so
Here is the clearest documented case, and I'd put it ahead of every other fact in this piece.
Bits of Freedom, a Dutch digital-rights organisation, took Meta to the Amsterdam District Court over how Facebook and Instagram present the non-profiled feed — the chronological one, posts from people you follow in the order they were posted, no recommendations. The court ruled on 2 Oct 2025. The finding was not that the option was missing. It was that the option was hard to find *and that it reverted* — that the product put you back on the algorithmic feed, and that automatic reversion of a user's choice is a prohibited dark pattern. Meta had until 31 Dec 2025 to fix it for Dutch users, under penalties reported at up to €5 million. It complied for Dutch users in January 2026, dropped much of its appeal, and said it would challenge the decision in full proceedings; on 10 Mar 2026 the Amsterdam appeals court upheld the October ruling. The order covers the Netherlands only.
Outside the Netherlands, the behaviour the court objected to is just how the product works. Documentation of the Most Recent view has said for years that there is no way to make it the default, that it reverts to Top Stories on your next login, and that the entry itself can drop out of the filter bar if you don't use it regularly. Without the help centre I can't verify current menu wording, so take the people who do. On 9 Apr 2026, u/thebroned asked r/facebook why it was so hard to see posts in order: "I know there's a 'recent' option somewhere, but it feels hidden and doesn't stay that way. Is there any way to make it stick, or do you have to switch it every time?" That is a user independently deriving a Dutch court's legal finding from the feel of an app.
The same pattern shows up in smaller places nobody writes about. On 6 Nov 2025 u/son-of-oi posted in r/facebook that the list of people who had reacted to a post was no longer in the order the reactions happened. u/Cool-Application5431 replied that it now appears ranked by who's most likely to interact, "costing me at least an additional hour of scrolling through reactions, each day," and u/Giobuc_rm: "It's truly irritating to see the number of likes on a post or photo increase by 10 and not know who added those new 10 likes." A chronological list of events became a ranked list of people. No announcement, because there was no feature to announce — only a sort order, changed.
And the settings screen itself moves. On 12 Jun 2026, u/Sahri81 asked r/facebook whether the option to hide your friend list had been removed: "I've been looking for that option but I can't find it anywhere because Facebook keeps changing their settings screen! Does anyone know if it's still there and if so, where?" As far as I can establish, it is still there. That's the whole problem. After thirty years of this I've got a low opinion of software that treats its own configuration as disposable, and the tell is exactly this: a user who cannot tell whether a control was deleted or relocated. In a system that respects you, those two don't feel the same.
The control surface, which is the part actually worth your time
Now the useful bit, because there is one. Facebook has a set of privacy, ad and data tools that are genuinely good, genuinely free, and findable only if you already know they're there. On 17 Oct 2023 Meta moved them into Accounts Center, reachable from Settings on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger — recently enough that most published instructions predate it. Per Meta's own listing it has five sections: Personal details (contact info, identity confirmation, memorialisation, deletion and deactivation), Password and security, Your information and permissions, Ad preferences, and Payments.
Your activity off Meta technologies. The single most informative control on the platform: it shows the activity other businesses' sites and apps have sent to Meta about you, and lets you cut off a specific business, clear what's been collected, and disconnect future activity. It was called Off-Facebook Activity until that same October 2023 announcement renamed it Activity Off-Meta Technologies and extended it to Instagram. If you've never opened it, open it once — the list is usually longer than people expect. That you can only find it four levels deep in a menu renamed three years ago is this article's whole thesis in one screen.
Exporting your data, and the two names it has. The archive tool moved into Accounts Center in the same change, with Access Your Information and Transfer Your Information. Here's the detail I'd never have got from a press release: Meta's *developer* documentation calls the user-facing tool Export Your Information (EYI) — that's the name in the onboarding guide for third parties who want to appear as transfer destinations, built on the open-source Data Transfer Project. Meanwhile users see both names at once. On 3 May 2026 u/dead_but_preety described using "Export Your Information > Messages"; on 11 May 2026 u/almasalvaje wrote up a photo export via "Meta's Download Your Information Tool"; on 15 Aug 2026 u/Ok_Significance_9103 wanted a parser that didn't rely on "Download your information". One tool, two names, same year.
Now the caveat that makes this a recommendation rather than a cheer: people report the export coming back incomplete without saying so. u/dead_but_preety got messages data containing group chats and company Messenger threads but not the one-on-one photos actually wanted. On 8 Jun 2025 u/Queasy-Ice-2575 requested a full export, got a file "in a matter of seconds", and found it held login details and a profile picture. u/Ok_Significance_9103 spent four days unzipping archive packs to find the target DMs weren't in them. So run the export, then *verify it against something you know should be in it.* An export you haven't checked is not a backup — and Facebook is where I'd apply that hardest, because there's no support queue to call when the zip is short.
Memorialisation and a legacy contact. Under Personal details you can nominate someone to manage your profile after you die. A legacy contact can pin a post to your timeline, accept friend requests and change the cover photo, and — if you grant it — download an archive. They cannot read your messages, log in as you, or remove your old posts, photos or friends. Two minutes, 18 or over, main profile only. Of everything here, this is the item most people should do and almost nobody has.
Ad preferences. The Ad topics list shows the categories Facebook has attached to you; marking one "See less" both reduces ads in it and stops advertisers targeting you on that interest, and it's reversible. None of this stops ads. It's the difference between being profiled accurately and being profiled badly, and if you're on the platform anyway, I'd rather the profile be one I've pruned.
Saved and collections. Still there, still free, still the best under-used thing in the product for research: save a post, file it into a collection, collections default to Only me. It lives behind "See more" in the left menu on desktop, and has survived a decade unmolested while everything around it was rearranged — probably because nobody has figured out how to monetise a bookmark. Friend lists, by contrast, survive only as an audience selector for posting and privacy; the thing that made them interesting, reading a feed of one list, was shut down on 9 Aug 2018 as a "lesser-used feature". Anything recommending them for feed curation is seven years out of date.
Where there is no control at all
A piece that says "use the privacy settings" without this next paragraph is an advertisement.
On 1 Oct 2025 Meta announced that interactions with its generative AI tools would feed content and ad personalisation; notifications began 7 Oct, and the policy took effect 16 Dec 2025. It applies to people who use Meta AI, excludes the EU, the UK and South Korea, and excludes sensitive categories such as religion, politics, sexual orientation, health and ethnicity. There is no setting that turns it off. Reporting consistently describes ad preferences as able to soften targeting but not to remove AI chat data from the loop.
The controls that exist are real and I recommend them. They also exist at the platform's discretion, cover what it chose to cover, and stop precisely where a new data source starts. In the EU and UK they stop somewhere else, for the obvious reason — which is the uncomfortable point of the next section.
What it costs to be wrong, and where there's anyone to appeal to
Meta's EU position is public record in its own filings. It launched a less-personalised-ads option in November 2024, alongside a price cut for the ad-free subscription from €9.99 to €5.99 a month on the web and €12.99 to €7.99 on mobile from 13 Nov 2024. In April 2025 the European Commission decided its "subscription for no ads" model did not comply with Article 5(2) of the Digital Markets Act and fined it €200 million; Meta is appealing while having made what it calls significant modifications, which the Commission acknowledged in December 2025.
Set that beside being an ordinary account holder with a problem. On 24 Jun 2025 a developer posted to Hacker News that their Meta developer account had been restricted without warning, possibly over an IP-address change, with no appeal route. lrvick, in that thread: "They can ban anyone for any reason at any time, and it does not need to be a good reason. There is no appeals court for corpotech." easyThrowaway described what actually worked at a marketing firm whose clients' accounts kept getting auto-disabled — "The real customer service for any Meta-related service is their legal department" — lawyers wrote, accounts came back, and it wasn't cheap. netdevphoenix put the rule plainly: "getting access to human support is only a thing for paid accounts."
That rule is visible in the product. Meta Verified for businesses launched at $21.99 a month per Facebook Page or Instagram account, $34.99 for both, with account support as a named benefit. On 11 Oct 2026 u/Particular_Train3263 titled a post in r/FacebookAds: "Meta confirmed a hidden ad account block, but won't let me appeal it. Do I really have to PAY to speak to a human?" — campaigns active, zero delivery, Account Quality showing no restrictions, support reachable only as an AI chat. u/UnderstoodChinchilla, replying: "paying to report their own bug is a new low." On 11 Aug 2026 u/lowkey_loki_stan, a social media manager at a public university, described a two-year-old restriction with zero policy violations, zero rejected ads, and no appeal button present at all. In June 2025 thousands of Facebook Groups were suspended at once; Meta's Andy Stone told TechCrunch only that the company was "aware of a technical error", never published a cause, and admins reported wildly uneven restoration.
And then the one genuinely hopeful finding here, which is jurisdictional. The EU's Digital Services Act created certified out-of-court dispute settlement bodies. Per the Commission's own page there are now 11, certified by authorities in 8 member states; any EU user may pick any body that handles their language regardless of country; the user usually pays nothing or a token fee; and if the body rules in the user's favour the platform pays all the fees. The decisions are not binding, but both sides must engage in good faith.
On 20 Oct 2026, three days before I wrote this, u/LukasWeegenaar156 posted an account to r/facebook of winning such a case. Their telling: account hijacked 18 Jul 2024, disabled by automation 21 Jul 2024, no human review for nearly two years; complaint filed 17 Jul 2026 with ADR Point, the Greek body certified on 23 Jun 2025; Meta responded only with an automated email, which the body ruled was not good-faith engagement; ruling on 20 Oct 2026 overturning the suspension and requiring restoration by 20 Nov 2026. It's one user's self-report and I can't verify the case file. What I can verify is that the channel exists, costs the user nothing, and has no counterpart for the same account holder in Los Angeles or Lagos. u/Jaded-Bar-7743, in that thread, caught the part that matters: "The part where automated email not counting as good faith is interesting, wonder if that will set some precedent."
Two real withdrawals from the same stretch, neither ever listicle material: Meta shut down CrowdTangle on 14 Aug 2024, replacing it with a Content Library open to academic and non-profit researchers by application and closed to commercial newsrooms — removing the main public instrument for checking what Facebook was actually distributing. And the Facebook News tab was sunset in the US and Australia in April 2024, after the UK, Germany and France in 2023, Meta citing an 80% usage drop.
What I'd actually do
- Open Accounts Center once, on a laptop, and walk all five sections. Settings → Accounts Center. Twenty minutes, once a year. Every instruction older than October 2023 points at a menu that no longer exists, including most of what a search engine will hand you.
- Read Your activity off Meta technologies, then disconnect future activity. Of the controls that exist, the highest ratio of effect to effort.
- Set a legacy contact. Personal details → Memorialisation. Two minutes. Nobody regrets this; plenty of families have discovered the absence of it.
- Export your information — then verify the archive. Open it and look for something specific you know should be there. The reports of silently short exports are consistent enough that an unchecked archive shouldn't count as a backup.
- Prune Ad topics instead of hoping to escape them. You can't turn off being profiled, and since 16 Dec 2025 you can't exclude AI-chat data outside the EU, UK and South Korea. You can make the profile less wrong.
- Assume any feed order you choose is temporary. Set Most Recent if you like it; expect to set it again. If chronological reading matters, the Friends tab Meta launched on 27 Mar 2025 for the US and Canada shows only friends' content with no recommendations — a closer approximation than the main feed, though Meta never claimed it was sorted by time.
- Don't put anything load-bearing behind a login you can't appeal. Live video evaporates at 30 days. Groups get suspended in batches with no published cause. Accounts get disabled by automation and the appeal button is sometimes simply absent. If your business, archive or contact list lives only on Facebook, that's a single point of failure whose owner has no obligation to answer the phone — and in most of the world, no regulator who'll make them.
The reason I bothered is the gap between the two halves. The control surface in Accounts Center is better than Facebook's reputation suggests and I'd genuinely recommend the half-hour. But a platform that reorganises its own settings faster than anyone can document them has, in effect, made its best features private. The 2022 article called them "hidden gems" as a compliment. Four years on the word is just accurate, and it wasn't the features that changed.