Here’s the official news from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s new privacy launching gradually over at www.facebook.com/privacy – which they state “Making Control Simple”.
When we started Facebook, we built it around a few simple ideas. People want to share and stay connected with their friends and the people around them. When you have control over what you share, you want to share more. When you share more, the world becomes more open and connected.
Today, I want to share some thoughts on how we’ve evolved to this point, what we’re doing now to give you more control, and what you can expect from us going forward.
Looking back, the first version of Facebook was very simple. There were almost no features. There were no status updates, photo albums or messages. There was no News Feed or Platform. The only people who could use it were college students in the United States.
The way the site worked was that everyone could see some basic information about you and the rest of your information was only visible to people in your networks and your friends by default.
As the site grew and as we rolled out new features, Facebook became less about colleges and more about sharing lots of content with different groups of people. So a little more than a year ago, we started working on a new privacy model to reflect how the site had evolved.
As News Feed became more central to your experience, we added privacy settings so you could control who could see each individual status update, photo album, video and everything else you share into the stream.
As Platform became more popular, we restricted the way applications could access your personal information. Now all applications and websites can only see content that is already visible to everyone. They must get permission to access anything else.
As regional networks grew to include more and more people, we decided to phase them out since they were too big for you to effectively control your information. While this was not a big issue in the United States, more than 50 percent of you worldwide were in networks that spanned whole countries like India and Turkey.
Replacing regional networks meant we needed a new model for control. In general, we recommended that you share basic info like status updates and posts with everyone, content like photos and videos of you with friends of your friends, and sensitive items like contact information with only your real friends. We asked each of you to look at your settings and choose what you wanted.
More recently, we also launched community pages and other ways to give you personalized and social experiences on other sites you use.
Since then, you have sent us lots of feedback. We’ve listened carefully in order to figure out the best next steps. We recognize that we made a lot of changes, so we really wanted to take the time to understand your feedback and make sure we address your concerns.
The number one thing we’ve heard is that there just needs to be a simpler way to control your information. We’ve always offered a lot of controls, but if you find them too hard to use then you won’t feel like you have control. Unless you feel in control, then you won’t be comfortable sharing and our service will be less useful for you. We agree we need to improve this.
Today we’re starting to roll out some changes that will make all of these controls a lot simpler. We’ve focused on three things: a single control for your content, more powerful controls for your basic information and an easy control to turn off all applications.
Simpler privacy controls gradually launching at www.facebook.com/privacy
First, we’ve built one simple control to set who can see the content you post. In a couple of clicks, you can set the content you’ve posted to be open to everyone, friends of your friends or just your friends.
This control will also apply to settings in new products we launch going forward. So if you decide to share your content with friends only, then we will set future settings to friends only as well. This means you won’t have to worry about new settings in the future.
This single control makes it easier to set who can see all your content at once, but you can still use all of the same granular controls we’ve offered if you’d like.
Second, we’ve reduced the amount of basic information that must be visible to everyone and we are removing the connections privacy model. Now we’ll be giving you the ability to control who can see your friends and pages. These fields will no longer have to be public.
The controls for this basic information can be found at the top of the privacy page in Basic Directory Information. We recommend that you make these settings open to everyone. Otherwise, people you know may not be able to find you and that will make the site less useful for you.
Third, we’ve made it simple to control whether applications and websites can access any of your information. Many of you enjoy using applications or playing games, but for those of you who don’t we’ve added an easy way to turn off Platform completely. This will make sure that none of your information is shared with applications or websites.
If you simply want to turn off instant personalization, we’ve also made that easier. Already, partner sites can only see things you’ve made visible to everyone. But if you want to prevent them from even seeing that, you can now easily turn off instant personalization completely.
Finally and perhaps most importantly, I am pleased to say that with these changes the overhaul of Facebook’s privacy model is complete. If you find these changes helpful, then we plan to keep this privacy framework for a long time. That means you won’t need to worry about changes. (Believe me, we’re probably happier about this than you are.)
Of course we’ll continue responding to your feedback and making things simpler. But after our recent changes we’re now done migrating away from the old network-based privacy model. Our new model will help the Facebook community grow to millions of more people around the world.
On a personal note, I just turned 26 years old a few days ago. I started Facebook when I was 19 and it’s amazing to look back at how it has evolved. There have been a lot of changes over the years as we’ve continued to innovate, and I appreciate that you have all stuck with us. Each time we make a change we try to learn from past lessons, and each time we make new mistakes too. We are far from perfect, but we always try our hardest to build the best service for you and for the world. So I just want to say thanks.
We’ll be rolling out these changes to all of you over the next few weeks. You can always check out the new privacy page, which explains how the settings will work. When you get the new controls, please play around and find the settings that feel best for you. If you have any questions or comments, let us know. We’re listening.