Faced with growing disenchantment with Facebook’s privacy controls, CEO Mark Zuckerberg today held a press conference to release details of the revamp of the site’s oft-criticized controls. Here’s a rundown of the changes and our first take on them.
App access. Apps, including the controversial new Instant Personalization, can be turned off completely with one control. Facebook users with no interest in apps, and particularly those who don’t want apps to be able to access their info just because a friend is using it, will probably appreciate this change.
Our take: Letting users opt-in instead of making them opt-out—even with just one control—would be a better change.
Content settings. All your content is now grouped into a setting called “Sharing on Facebook.” Content in the world of Facebook consists of, among other things, your status updates, photos, religious and political views, and family and relationship information, as well as photos of you tagged by others. It also includes your contact info. You can choose to share with Everyone, Friends of Friends, or Friends Only for each piece of content info.
Unlike with the more complicated current settings, you no longer have to go into three separate areas (Personal Information and Posts, Contact Info, and Friends, Tags and Connections) to find these settings. And there seem to be fewer options for each.
In fact, according to CNET’s coverage of the press conference, settings have been consolidated across the board: There will be fewer than 15 settings to make all your information private, compared to 50 in the current set-up. Ten settings that spanned three pages are now seven settings on one page. And the Privacy Center is now eight pages instead of 13.
Our take: The reduced number of settings and pages should make it easier for users to control their privacy. But we’ll withhold judgment on this one until we actually get to try it ourselves.
Basic information. Less basic directory information will be made public—name, profile picture, gender, and networks. Facebook will leave public other information that’s currently required to be public by default, but you’ll be able to change that info through the new privacy controls.
What’s new is that you’ll be able to decide whether you want non-Facebook friends to be able to send you friend requests; whether you want to get e-mail message from people you haven’t friended yet; and whether you want your education and work history to be public. Zuckerberg said that the new controls will apply retroactively, presumably meaning that if you’ve already set something to Friends Only, it will remain that way once the new controls come out.
Our take: Since Facebook has changed users’ settings back to its own defaults when it made privacy changes in the past, it’s a good idea to carefully check your controls once your account rolls over to the new settings.
The changes will roll out over the next few weeks. For more details, take a look at Zuckerberg’s blog.
Meanwhile, we’ll continue to offer our analysis of how effective we think Facebook’s new privacy controls are and how they might be made even fairer to consumers who use the site.
–Donna Tapellini
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