In an effort to improve privacy for its growing membership, Facebook announced Tuesday what it called a simpler model for privacy control. Under the new rules, a user can decide if individual pieces of content should be available only to friends, to friends of those friends, or to everyone.
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The controls include the ability to regulate every piece of content that a Facebook member creates or uploads. Because of the site’s prominence in social networking — and, increasingly, in business, e-commerce, politics and other areas — its position on privacy could have a ripple effect.
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Regional Networks ‘Lost Their Utility’
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In an open letter on the company blog, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg noted that the old privacy model was built around the idea of sharing content within networks, which were self-created communities for a school, a company, or a region. Zuckerberg noted that some networks cover entire countries, such as India or China.
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Although about 50 percent of Facebook’s members are now part of regional networks, the new plan is designed to remove those networks in favor of the new privacy model. Users will be asked in the next few weeks to update their privacy settings.
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Under the new rules, if a user wants to share, the individual content posting can be shared with one of those circles — friends, friends of friends, or everyone. The new controls also simplify the previous process, where privacy controls had been added per feature. Now the intention is to standardize the options so the choices are always the same.
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The direction of the new privacy controls was announced back in July, when it was launched in beta. At the time, the company noted that, with more than 300 million members, personal information published to a regional network did not make sense any more. Facebook’s Chris Kelly noted in…