Facebook Changes Aimed at Improved Privacy

Facebook Tuesday announced changes to its user port that are designed to improve user privacy and make the mixer meshing's privacy options easier to notic.

The changes get in easier for a drug user to control who sees what he or she posts to the social network and what is able to be seen on a user's Facebook page. The changes affect your profile varlet, your posts, and tagging and adds a new addition: A Doctor of Osteopathy-over feature if you change your take care about who sees your military post.

Change Inside information

The changes start with a user's visibility page (see image below). Some content on the page leave have a drop-falling menu beside items there that lets the user know who can see the content–the exoteric, friends, or usage viewers. Those options can be changed with a single click.

Drop-down menus have also been added to posts that users make. Those menus bequeath be refined terminated time, according to Facebook Product V.P. Chris Cox. "These bequeath puddle it easy to quickly select incisively the consultation you want for whatsoever post," helium wrote in a troupe blog.

Facebook is also introducing a screen of "do-over" feature. If you deepen your thinker about who should fancy a posting later you brand it, you can change that with the neglect down menu, even after it has been posted (construe with image below).

Tagging has likewise been altered. Previously, photos and postings in which users were labelled automatically appeared on their profile pages. Now the substance abuser can approve or reject a labelled item before it appears on their visibility page. They bum't, nonetheless, block the tagged item from appearing connected another substance abuser's pages.

Tagging has been expanded a bit, too (see image beneath). Users now can trail "friends" surgery non-friends, also arsenic pages, whether they "like" them or not. In addition, options for removing tags have been clarified.

Location options have also been changed. Previously, you could reveal your placement only through the Places feature on a smartphone. Now you'll constitute able to add location information to anything—status update, pic or surround posting—and from whatsoever device. Naturally, you can also choose non to reveal that information, too.

"These changes will go to straighten in the upcoming days," Cox wrote. "When they reach you, you'll see a prompt for a enlistment that walks you through with these new features from your homepage."

Not Sufficiency Concealment?

However, at to the lowest degree one security expert maintains the interpersonal network should take over gone further to protect users' privacy.

As good as the new changes are, Facebook incomprehensible a real opportunity to advance privacy on its network, says Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant with Sophos, a cyber security software maker. "A peck of these things are quite aesthetic," Cluley told PC World. "They could possess done more about general privacy and safety on Facebook."

"Some of the things they've through with Here are enceinte, and they're a step in the perpendicular steering," he added, "simply I vex that there are more profound opportunities they could have taken which they unheeded with this revamp."

One of those opportunities cited by Cluley was to put more "opt-in" choices in the Facebook system, instead of requiring users to "prefer-out" of its offerings. "They've lay a dainty varnish over Facebook," he said. "But what we haven't got is anything which says, 'From now on, whenever we introduce a new feature, we're non going to share your information without your express agreement."

Changes: Google+ Inspired?

Although Facebook denies it, it appears that the changes are a response to Google's upstart social meshing, Google+. "Even some of the language which Facebook is nowadays victimisation is a direct copy of Google+," Cluley declared. "For instance, you no more share with everyone, you share with 'public.'"

"This is a reaction to Google+," he said. "That's not a bad thing. That's how fight develops things. Facebook should be applauded from that point of view."

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