Facebook changes privacy settings

Caving to pressure, Facebook announced it would change its privacy policy. New users will now default to having their updates shared with friends instead of publicly.

Here are the details from Vindu Goel in the New York Times:

Do you know who can see what you are posting on Facebook, including your photos, birthday and personal cellphone number?

Chances are that you don’t.

Facebook is worried that you will start sharing less — or maybe even move to more anonymous services — unless it helps you better manage your private information. On Thursday, the company announced that it would give a privacy checkup to every one of its 1.28 billion users worldwide.

Facebook, which is based in Menlo Park, Calif., will also change how it treats new users by initially setting their posts to be seen only by friends. Previously, those posts were accessible to anyone.

And it will explain to both current and new users that setting their privacy to “public” means that anyone can see their photos and posts.

Forbes contributor Larry Magid made an important point about you post settings:

You can easily change the audience of each post and once you make a change it becomes sticky, which means it remains that way till you change it again. So, if you normally post to friends and decide to post something to the public, your subsequent posts will also be public until you change it back to friends only.

That stickiness is important to remember. If you normally post just to friends and decide to post something publicly, you must remember to change the setting back to Friend the next time you post or your posts will remain accessible to the public.

Writing for the Chicago Tribune, Scott Kleinberg said many people welcomed the change in policy from the social network:

For users already familiar with Facebook and its privacy settings, a privacy checkup tool will pop up soon reminding you of your settings and giving you the option to change them. But if you currently have your posts defaulted to a public setting, that won’t change.

Privacy settings in the Facebook mobile apps have been updated recently, with the audience selector being much more prominent and use.

Since 2009, this setting defaulted to public. It was easy enough to change to friends, but once the mistake was made users didn’t always realize it right away. Judging by reaction on social media – on Facebook and other platforms – the decision is a welcome one.

Not new, but worth pointing out is if you’ve posted previously and are regretting the decision, you can change the visibility of any post.

The Washington Post story by Hayley Tsukayama said Facebook was moving away from the idea that all information should be public. The company also made some recent missteps:

In recent months, Facebook, which has made some notable privacy missteps in the past, has appeared to be moving away from the “share everything” mentality that was promoted in its earlier days by chief executive Mark Zuckerberg. While the social network still encourages information sharing and collection, it has taken steps to simplify and clarify its privacy settings. And it has made some new tools optional, such as a feature enabling users to track their friends in real time.

That said, Facebook is still rolling out some additions that have made users uncomfortable. This week, the company’s new “Ask” feature, which allows users to send one-on-one messages to their Facebook friends to get more information than what’s listed on that person’s profile, drew sharp criticism from those who thought it crossed a line. Or, as my Washington Post colleague Caitlin Dewey described it, an “unabashedly nosey new feature that no one asked for and — we can only hope – no one will use.”

Facebook may have hoped that friends would use the feature to seek information such as friends’ phone numbers — a detail that many people do not put on their Facebook profiles — for spur-of-the-moment plans. That would fit in with the platform’s attempts to foster more real-time interactions as it fights off competition from Twitter and smaller, fast-growing networks such as Snapchat.

But in this case, the feature did not sit well with many people, particularly because it also allowed users to ask their friends about their relationship status — an application that turns the feature into a sort of virtual pick-up line, and not a very good one.

No matter what the intention, Facebook is obviously trying to adapt and give users what they want in order to keep eyes on the site and new users signing up. The company continues to mine an incredible amount of data and giving users the ability to better control it is good business. Happy users also mean Facebook has more leverage with advertisers, which is the ultimate goal.