After a few weeks of intense criticism, Facebook is redoing its privacy settings in a major way.
Harry McCracken, Technologizer
For years, Facebook has had a pretty consistent modus operandi: It breaks stuff, catches flack for it, and then-eventually-backpedals or otherwise responds to the criticism. The tradition continues with CEO Mark Zuckerberg's new blog post. After a few weeks of intense unhappiness over the company's recent new features and related changes to privacy policies, it'sredoing its privacy settings in a major way.
Zuckerberg says that the new features will take a few weeks to reach every Facebook user. I don't see them yet. But here's a recap of what he says is new:
- Rather than having to wade through gazillions of granular settings, it'll be easy to tell Facebook you want anything you post to be visible to friends only, friends of friends, or everybody. These rules will apply to future Facebook functionality that doesn't exist yet.
- You'll be able to make your Friends and Pages lists completely private.
- It'll be easier to block apps on Facebook from getting at your information.
- It'll be easier to block external sites such as Pandora which use Facebook's new "Instant Personalization" from getting at your information. (Currently there's no single place to go to do this, nor any way to block all sites with one click)
- If users find these changes satisfactory, Facebook intends to avoid major changes to privacy policies "for a long time".
