First off…a change to the massive network scenario. I can’t tell you how many times I have been teaching a workshop where we check on their Facebook settings only to discover that there profile has been open to ALL of their network. When people originally sign up for their Facebook account, they are asked which networks they want to be a part of. Many choose the city that they live in. Therefore, if your profile is open up to ALL in your network, you are open to almost ALL who live in your area. This is a problem. With this announcement, that problem goes away.
Second, I am so excited that we will be able to decide per post who will be able to see it. I’ve been wanting to see this released for a while. Now, when I make a post that I don’t want my “Professional” Friend List to see, I can do it without fear! Love it!!
An Open Letter from Facebook Founder Mark ZuckerbergShareby Mark Zuckerberg Tue at 9:23pmIt has been a great year for making the world more open and connected. Thanks to your help, more than 350 million people around the world are using Facebook to share their lives online.To make this possible, we have focused on giving you the tools you need to share and control your information. Starting with the very first version of Facebook five years ago, we’ve built tools that help you control what you share with which individuals and groups of people. Our work to improve privacy continues today.
Facebook’s current privacy model revolves around “networks” — communities for your school, your company or your region. This worked well when Facebook was mostly used by students, since it made sense that a student might want to share content with their fellow students.
Over time people also asked us to add networks for companies and regions as well. Today we even have networks for some entire countries, like India and China.
However, as Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and we’ve concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy. Almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us. If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information.
The plan we’ve come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.
We’re adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In addition, we’ll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings. If you want to read more about this, we began discussing this plan back in July.
Since this update will remove regional networks and create some new settings, in the next couple of weeks we’ll ask you to review and update your privacy settings. You’ll see a message that will explain the changes and take you to a page where you can update your settings. When you’re finished, we’ll show you a confirmation page so you can make sure you chose the right settings for you. As always, once you’re done you’ll still be able to change your settings whenever you want.
We’ve worked hard to build controls that we think will be better for you, but we also understand that everyone’s needs are different. We’ll suggest settings for you based on your current level of privacy, but the best way for you to find the right settings is to read through all your options and customize them for yourself. I encourage you to do this and consider who you’re sharing with online.
Thanks for being a part of making Facebook what it is today, and for helping to make the world more open and connected.
Mark Zuckerberg
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I absolutely love the blog post from certain people/contact lists. I use this all the time. Both for personal items I only want a select ‘approved’ few to see and for professional items that I don’t want my competition to see. Great post.