Facebook Improves User Privacy Controls

Backing away from Zuckerberg's dream of a world without privacy—at least for now.

(Jennifer Abel @ ConsumerAffairs) A common complaint which Facebook users have had almost as long as there's been a Facebook is this: its confusing and oft-changing privacy policies make it extremely easy to overshare without realizing it — in other words, you post something you think will be visible only to a small select group of people, only to learn it's visible to anybody with an Internet connection.

That's because Facebook accounts used to default to a public setting — in other words, any post you made was visible to everybody unless you specifically changed your settings to make them private. And for years, Facebook mostly hand-waved away any complaints about its confusing privacy policies.

Indeed, a few years ago Mark Zuckerberg went so far as to call privacy an obsolete value. “When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was 'Why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?'”

Sharing is noble?

Of course, that idea didn't need long to change, and Zuckerberg seemed to feel that ending privacy altogether was a cause worth working toward:

“People have gotten really comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people …. That social norm is just something that evolved over time. We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.”

If Facebook's privacy settings were any indication, Zuckerberg seemed to think those “current social norms” included “Sharing more and different information is synonymous with sharing all information” or “Sharing information with more people should entail sharing information with all people” or “When I tell my friends about my wild-n-crazy weekend, I always hope my boss and my super-strict grandmother hear about it, too” and other things which nobody actually believes, which is why pretty much everybody who's not Mark Zuckerberg always hated Facebook's public-default system.

But Facebook is finally paying attention to those complaints. On May 22, Facebook announced that it was changing its default settings, in part because of user complaints: “We've … received the feedback that [Facebook users] are sometimes worried about sharing something by accident, or sharing with the wrong audience.”

Set to "private"

As a result of these changes, new Facebook accounts will automatically be set to “private,” and you'll have to deliberately change the settings to make your posts public. For people already on Facebook, the company will start giving what it calls “privacy checkups” over the next few weeks, especially for people with “public” settings: try making a post and first, a pop-up window will remind you that this post will be publicly visible, and ask if you want to change that.

Regular Facebook users should also expect to see occasional pop-ups offering tutorials about other aspects of Facebook settings.