NEW YORK: Responding to mounting pressure from users and privacy groups, Facebook introduced a new, simplified version of its privacy controls on Wednesday. Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s founder and chief executive, said the revised settings will make it easier for users to understand how much of their personal information is publicly accessible on the web.
“The settings have gotten complex, and it has become hard for people to use them to effectively control their settings,” said Zuckerberg in a press event at Facebook headquarters. “We wanted to make it really easy to change privacy settings in just a couple of clicks” . Facebook said it will give its users a simple control to determine whether their information is visible to only friends, friends of friends or everyone on the internet. These settings will be applied retroactively to everything users have published on Facebook in the past.
In addition, Facebook said it has changed its directory of users to show only minimal information when people search for others, like the name, profile picture and gender. It earlier required users to make more information public.
Facebook will also include an easier way for users to turn off its “instant personalisation” feature, which allows partner sites like Yelp and Pandora to gain access to their personal information, and better control over whether they give information to third-party applications. These applications will “dramatically reduce access to your info,” Zuckerberg said. “If they want to access anything specifically , they have to seek permission.”
Zuckerberg said the privacy settings will be introduced over the next few weeks and the company will add a message to Facebook’s home page alerting users to the revamped privacy controls. “This is something we take very seriously,” he said. The announcement was prompted by the recent scrutiny the company has come under for making changes to its service that encouraged users to make more of their personal information publicly accessible to anyone on the internet.
Although Facebook previously offered extensive and detailed privacy controls, experts and analysts said that few of the site’s 400 million members were aware of them. Those who did, were often bewildered by the settings, as it provided more than 170 different options to adjust how much of their profile information was shared online. Facebook said that users will still have access to the more detailed settings, but the simplified controls will be more prominently displayed.
.
