Analyzing Facebook’s Simplified Privacy Controls
Earlier this week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote a letter to the Washington Post apologizing for Facebook’s complicated privacy settings and offering new simplified controls later in the week. Today, Zuckerberg made good on his promise during a special press conference at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto.
In his remarks, Zuckerberg explained how Facebook evolved to its current position, citing the various changes the company has gone through over the last six years. Essentially, Zuckerberg made the argument that Facebook’s privacy betrayal was not a malicious act, but a side effect of the company’s efforts to adapt to growth and changes in user behavior. (Many would disagree with this explanation, but we won’t get into that right now.)
In any case, Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook’s current privacy controls were too confusing for some users and that the company would be rolling out a new option that makes the process much easier. These new controls, which can be seen in the screenshot below, still allow for granular privacy settings but also make it easy to restrict all profile information with only one click.
As you can see from the screenshot, the goal of the new privacy controls is to give users the option of easily sharing all of their information with any of Facebook’s three defined groups — friends only, friends of friends, and everyone. To make customized changes (you want to share your birthday with friends of friends, but everything else with friends only) the user can select the Custom option and go through more granular controls.
Facebook also offers its own recommended sharing settings, though I personally don’t agree with them – should photos and videos really be for friends of friends? For more information on Facebook’s changes, check out the company’s official privacy guide.
We haven’t used Facebook’s new controls for ourselves yet, so we’ll reserve full judgment until we can play with them a bit more, but from these early screenshots, it looks like Zuckerberg really took the criticism to heart. A one-click solution was something that many critics demanded, but I honestly didn’t expect Facebook to deliver.
When myself and the rest of the RepDef team get the chance to play with the settings ourselves, we will update this post with further impressions. We will also update our Comprehensive Facebook Privacy Settings Guide to reflect the new controls.
In the meantime, what do you think of Facebook’s new privacy controls. Does it address your privacy concerns?
