Facebook now has a whopping 350 million users worldwide. It is much ahead of its social networking rivals such as MySpace. In order to retain its growing popularity and its huge user base, Facebook has been trying to add new features and change its privacy policy to take care of the ever-rising privacy concerns. Now, Facebook has announced certain new changes to its privacy policy.
In an Open Letter to the Facebook users, the Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced these privacy changes. Facebook’s current privacy model is based on “networks” which are communities for schools, companies or regions. Mark writes that 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”. Since then, in some cases, even an entire country has been considered as a regional network, such as India and China. However, with exponential growth in the number of users of Facebook (total 350 million now), some of the regional networks have millions of users. In fact, more than 50% of Facebook users are members of regional networks. So, this has caused privacy concerns. The main problem is that when you belong to a network in Facebook, you become “friend” of everyone in that network. This means that everyone else in that Network can see everything on your Facebook page. Though there are settings that can change it, but not many people are aware about that or bother about that. This means that if you belong to a network that has millions of users and if you’ve not taken care to change your privacy settings properly, then all those millions of users can perhaps see your personal / private information, photos, etc. This has serious privacy concerns for many users.
Now, in its latest privacy policy changes, Facebook has completely done away with the regional networks. The new privacy model becomes simpler in as much as now you can set your Facebook content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone. So, if you want to confine your contents only amongst your friends, who can be chosen by you, you can do it and your contents will become invisible to all others. This will take care of some of the privacy concerns.
Another change in the privacy model is the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content that you create or upload to Facebook. So, now you get finer control to have settings for each piece of content separately. Moreover, the privacy settings page is being made simpler by combining some settings.
In view of these privacy changes, the users will be able to change their settings as per the new privacy model. So, you can change your privacy settings depending upon your own liking and requirements.
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