Facebook Introduces Simpler Privacy Features
Posted by on May 28th, 2010 View Comments
Posted in Reputation Management, Social Media |
For weeks, Facebook has been slammed by many of its critics and its users because of the many upgrades it has implemented all at the same time. Many users believe that such “developments” have eroded most, if not all, the privacy that they enjoy. This week, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced a new set of features that will hopefully address all the criticisms that his company has received the past few weeks.
Since the launching of the Open Graph API and Instant Personalization, the Internet has been abuzz albeit negatively about all these developments that the new Facebook offers. It has not bided well for the company and they have since done some damage control to address all of their privacy problems.
Zuckerberg presented all of these newer developments at the company’s headquarters this week, opening it up with a brief history lesson on how Facebook and its privacy and security features have evolved through the years. He also continued to enumerate several problems that his company may encounter along the way and how the company is planning to address them.
All of Facebook’s basic features will still be enjoyed but its privacy settings were made much simpler compared to the controversial settings it introduced a few weeks back. Some of these new privacy settings include:
- A single control to edit content-viewing permissions Users can now choose to edit their permissions and allow only certain people to view their posts and content. This applies to everything whether blog posts, shout-outs, videos, pictures, tags and others. Also, your past posts will be automatically affected by the settings that you choose. You can choose to show your Facebook account’s content either to your friends only, friends of friends or to everyone. You can also customize by choose the “Other” option on your privacy settings. This customized options also applies to the pages that you like, the videos or pictures in which you have been tagged, your bio, family, and relationships among others.
- Easier People Search With just one click you can find friends you are looking for among the many users in Facebook.
- Turning off the Facebook Platform This enables users to easily turn Facebook’s Instant Personalization setting off. This will disallow Facebook from sharing personal information or your own FB account to third party sites freely.
- Unsharing your Friend’s List You can choose to not share your friend’s list or favorite pages to everyone, only to your approved contacts.
Facebook is expected to implement all of these new developments little by little over the next few weeks. They would be prompting their users on their home pages about these features so that they can edit their accounts accordingly. Facebook hopes to send a message that the company looks out for the welfare of its users that’s why it is giving them these options. Basically, these new features allow users to not let other people or third party sites to see what their personal accounts feature.
Though Facebook is basically a social networking site where everyone can connect with anyone, having the freedom to do so brings with it potential risks regarding privacy. This has been the main problem that the company wants to address in introducing all of these new but simpler customization features.
