What Does Facebook's Privacy Transition Mean for You? Facebook's New Privacy Changes: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Five months after it first announced coming privacy changes this past summer, Facebook is finally rolling out a new set of revamped privacy settings for its 350 million users.
The social networking site has rightly been criticized for its confusing privacy settings, most notably in a must-read report by the Canadian Privacy Commissioner issued in July and most recently by a Norwegian consumer protection agency. We're glad to see Facebook is attempting to respond to those privacy criticisms with these changes, which are going live this evening.
Unfortunately, several of the claimed privacy "improvements" have created new and serious privacy problems for users of the popular social network service. The new changes are intended to simplify Facebook's notoriously complex privacy settings and, in the words of today's privacy announcement to all Facebook users, "give you more control of your information. " Our conclusion? ACLU of Northern California : Facebook Privacy in Transition - B. The next time you log onto Facebook, you'll be thinking about privacy: how private are your photos, friends, status updates, and personal details, and how public do you actually want them to be?
In response to pressure about its privacy practices, including an ACLU petition signed by over 43,000 concerned Internet users, Facebook has released a new privacy policy, modified its profile and publication privacy controls, and rolled out a "Transition Tool" to guide all 350 million Facebook users through the process of choosing new privacy settings. To learn more about today's changes and tips on the new privacy controls, visit our resource page, What Does Facebook's Privacy Transition Mean for You? We're glad to see Facebook finally put privacy front and center for every one of its users.
We hope other companies will do the same.