Facebook backtracked Friday and altered its newest feature at the behest of tens of thousands of its users.

The Facebook News Feed, which allowed users to see all of the recent actions of people designated as “friends,” drew complaints and protests from users who thought it was an invasion of privacy.

The feature was introduced last Tuesday, and on Friday the company announced that users could block the display of a category — making a news feed about which groups you join, for example — or disable the feature entirely. Before the changes, users had to delete actions individually from the feed.

Southern Methodist University senior English major Jaime Bell thought the move was a good one.

“I think that’s a good balance,” she said of the change. She also said the original development left much to be desired in terms of privacy.

“I understand the intention, but I don’t think it was well executed,” she said. “On a personal level, I can say I’ve taken off all my news feeds because I don’t care for anyone to see that information.”

Facebook higher-ups said the feature was designed to help users save time. They also emphasized, to no avail, that none of the information being broadcast was anything that wasn’t available before. Mark Zuckerberg, the Web site’s chief executive, apologized to users in an open letter Friday.

“We really messed this one up,” he said. He added that the security features should have been available since the site introduced the technology. “This was a big mistake on our part, and I’m sorry for it,” he wrote. “I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls.” But some users still think the feature is a bad idea. “They should’ve taken it off completely — it’s too Big Brother,” said junior chemistry major Zach Laucis.

Junior finance and economics major Alex Copp agreed. “I though it [the feed] was totally sketchy,” he said. “I pretty much haven’t used it as much since then because I don’t want people seeing stuff I do.”

As of Friday, more than 700,000 users had joined a group protesting the original feed. A nationwide boycott of the site that was supposed to happen today was canceled. So was a protest that was supposed to be held outside the company’s Palo Alto headquarters yesterday. The Web site has more than 10 million members, mostly college and high-school students. And Copp thinks the new privacy options still fall short for most of them.

“Honestly, I think the best thing for Facebook is just to go back to the way it was,” he said.