Gillian Shaw
Sun
Facebook rolled out long promised changes to its privacy settings Wednesday, giving users item-by-item control over the information they share and restricting minors to sharing content only with friends and people in their school or work network.
But at the same time, the world’s largest social networking site is letting users share their Facebook information with the online world, with an ‘everyone’ option that means words, photos, videos and other content can be picked up by Google and other search engines and viewed by anyone on the Internet.
Elliot Schrage, vice-president of communications, public policy and marketing for Facebook, told a conference call Wednesday that the new system is based on “contextual privacy,” letting users control the privacy level of “every single thing they share.”
He said the move was made in response to requests from users and from privacy experts. Canada’s privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart has called for more stringent privacy controls in a report that criticized Facebook over its sharing of users’ information.
Facebook said it has been “working closely” with Canada’s Privacy Commissioner in coming up with the revamped privacy measures and promised further action to address the privacy commissioners concerns.
The changes for Facebook’s more than 350 million users will come to their attention when they sign into an account and are prompted to check the new options and review their privacy settings. Users can skip that review once, but it will pop up again when they sign in after 24 hours have passed.
It’s a shift to a personalized privacy model over Facebook’s old model where users might set privacy settings once and either not understand the implications or forget what they have chosen to make public.
The biggest change allows personalized and contextual control over words, photos, videos and other content that is shared, allowing users to opt to share it with friends, friends of friends or everyone. There is also an option to create customized groups so that only people in a particular group could see certain information or could be blocked from specified viewers.
Regional networks have disappeared in the change. While users can opt to show where they live, they are no longer automatically linked to a network that in the case of centres like London, in the United Kingdom, could amount to millions of users.
Instead, users can choose to be part of a network, such as a school or work network, where participants are verified according to their e-mail addresses.
For users who are under 18, even specifying the ‘everyone’ option will only make that information available to friends, and people who are friends of those friends, or a verified network.
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