Facebook’s Privacy Overhaul: What you need to know!
by Robert Gembarski on August 26, 2011
It’s about time, Facebook! It took Mr. Zuckerberg long enough to realize that we want more PRIVACY! Since its conception, Facebook users have had issues with the privacy settings on their Facebook profile. Well here at last we have a little more control over what people can see and what they can tag you in.
In the next few days Facebook plans to roll out over a dozen new changes that make up two main categories: Profile privacy and the way in which users can share content. These major changes come after Google+ makes some headway to becoming the fastest growing social network in the world! (Check out our article on what Google+ is and how to use it) Essentially, Facebook has taken some of what Google+ offers and has integrated it into Facebook profiles.
New Privacy Settings
Facebook is done with the bulky privacy settings page and has now embedded them right on to the profile page. When you edit your profile page, a box on the right hand side will be there for you to edit your privacy settings, for that section. In addition, Facebook has taken the “View Profile As” page and moved it directly onto your profile page. Instead of going to the privacy settings to see this, it will now be on the top right of your profile page. You can now just type in someone’s name too see what your profile looks like too them, according to the settings you have enabled.
Along with showing you what others can see, Facebook has enabled a privacy feature to let you review tags from Locations, Pictures, and Posts before anyone else can see them on your profile. This includes people that aren’t Facebook friends with you as well. Now anyone can tag anyone else, but that person must review it before it gets posted to his or her page.
Content Sharing
That’s just half of it. Facebook has made some serious changes to the way we will be able to share content. Facebook takes a page from the new entrant Google +’s book, on content sharing. Just like Google+, Facebook has upgraded its publisher bar to include location, tags, and control over who can see your content. As mentioned above, you can now approve tags by friends or you can have an approved list of friends that can tag you without your approval. Facebook Places has also been integrated into the publisher bar. Now you can just “check in” through a status update, as well as tag photos and videos from that location. With this comes the upgrade on Facebook’s mobile app for iOS and Android. You will notice that Places has been replaced with “Nearby”, a section where you can see recent check-ins around your current location.
Facebook allows you to now pick and choose who sees your status updates just like Google+. You can choose to share a status with the “Public” which is anyone who can see your profile, or you could choose groups of particular people to share your status update. Clearly a move that needed to happened since the arrival of Google+.
Untagging
The last of the privacy changes is the ability to now untag yourself from Facebook content. They have come up with three new options that include untagging yourself from photos, asking the photo uploader to take down the photo, or block that person on Facebook.
Google+ must have really shaken up the industry this summer, for Facebook to revamp all their privacy settings, after it being criticized for so long. This summer of Social Media has been quite an interesting one to follow. What else can we expect to be taking place in the near future?
Thanks for explaining these. The sad thing about it is that we’ve been asking for these for a long time and it took another website (G+) to make Facebook listen. This only makes my distrust of FB even greater. They only do things when the pressure is too much and it shows that they really don’t care much about the users, but only their bottom line. I am pretty sure that if G+ hadn’t come out with these settings, we would not have seen any FB changes.
Thanks again Marieke for showing us the general new options!
Oscar recently posted..Making a Google Form public
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Hey Oscar, thanks for your response. To be fair to Facebook, they already had a major Facebook security update, was it 18 months ago? And some of those security options were already present. You were already able to share content with a select group of users. But the way it was possible was a big workaround – not very user friendly. Google showed Facebook that it could be done easier, and I am sure that will increase the number of people that are going to use the Facebook security options.