Facebook Changes Privacy Policy

Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the privacy policies of Facebook would be changing in the next few weeks. He explains in his blog:

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.

In it’s infancy, Facebook revolved around college campuses. You didn’t need to “friend” someone in order to see their full profile. You simply had to be a part of the same campus “network” and you had full access to their profile.

Eventually Facebook brought this same functionality to cities, meaning if you lived in Anytown, USA, all the people who claimed Anytown as their home could see your full profile. You could change this setting, but not without wading through the Facebook settings.

Zuckerberg and his team saw a need to change this–for various reasons–and are planning to do so very soon. Again, from the Facebook CEO’s blog:

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.

What does this mean? Networks, as we know it, go bye-bye. The only people who can see your profile are the ones you give access to.

This is a good move. As online privacy and identity control becomes more of an issue, Facebook is smart to tighten up access points.