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Facebook Privacy Settings: Control Your Info!

We have not logged on to Facebook for almost a week, and we decided to do so today – largely in part due to the fact that we have been reading about the new privacy settings all over the Web. As expected, we ran into the privacy announcement that shared how Facebook has provided improvements that will allow users to take more control of their information and “help you stay connected”.

facebook We went on to heed the warning straight away – we have been reading on how your account will be defaulted to being available to the public should the message be ignored, and we are certainly glad we did so.

When we got to the privacy settings update page, there it was: privacy settings that are defaulted to “Everyone” for About Me, Family and Relationships, Work and Education and Posts, “Friends of Friends” for Photos and Videos, Birthdays and Religious and Political Views, and “Friends” for E-mail addresses, IM and addresses.

A lot of people have been reacting to the fact that the “improved settings” were defaulted to one that will expose subscriber information into a more public scale than what people would normally choose. Facebook is now getting flak about their real reason for the changes: people have been questioning whether the goal of the changes was indeed to make the accounts more private or to make them more public.

In fairness to Facebook, the new capabilities do enable more control over one’s privacy settings. Users are now able to specify exactly which individual posts can be viewed by whom. There is even a feature now that will allow a user to basically block specific people from seeing a post, even if that post is essentially available to your entire friends network. This will really come in handy if you have particularly interesting information that you would like to share to the world – but keep from mom and dad, or from your girlfriend or boyfriend.