Facebook Changing Its Privacy System
posted Tuesday Dec 1, 2009 by Scott Ertz
This evening Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, posted an open letter to all users announcing an intention to change the way the site's privacy settings work. This is a long time coming. There has never been a major settings change in the 5 years Facebook has been around, despite the major changes in the way the system works.
The big change being made is in privacy settings to networks. Currently, if you are a member of a network, everyone has the ability to see your profile or not. Those are really your only choices as of now. When the site was all about schools, this made sense, but now that you've got people in networks of hundreds of thousands to millions of users, this isn't really an effective control system anymore. Zuckerberg said,
"The plan we've come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.
We're adding something that many of you have asked for - the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In addition, we'll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings."
I am hoping this will alleviate some of the speed and reliability issues that Facebook has suffered over the past few months. As the site has become more popular, everything seems to be lagging,and sometimes fails completely. We have heard everything from messenger failing to all friends disappearing.
Does this change in policy mean anything for you? Are you guys happy to have the ability to control who seems individual content on your profile, or is this just a change for change's sake? Let us know in the comments.
