Facebook Offers Privacy Tweaks as More Complaints Roll In

As we reported yesterday, Facebook’s new privacy settings rollout hasn’t exactly gone off without a hitch. For instance, when the privacy changes went into effect, Facebook users discovered that they were unable to specify whether they wanted to share their Facebook Friend List. By default, their friends were made public to the world. While this may seem unimportant to some, who you connect with online says a lot about who you are. For instance, if you are using Facebook for business networking and you have many prominent clients among your Facebook friends, your competition may be able to use that information to your detriment.

Today, Facebook acknowledged some of these criticisms and promised to make some tweaks that would further protect users. According to a prepared statement, Facebook has said it will “soon enable people to hide their friend lists. Those who choose to hide their friend lists will not have their lists discoverable through search engines or viewable by other users.”

It is a shame that everything didn’t roll out perfectly, but I don’t envy Facebook for having to efficiently manage changes to a community with over 350 million users. As David Coursey notes in his PC World article on the story, with all of the fixes Facebook is promising during this rollout, it would be wise for users to double check their privacy settings more than once over the next week or two.