[A January post on Facebook's new privacy settings from Inside Facebook]
Facebook’s new, more public privacy settings are here to stay. And there are a lot of details that you should make sure you’re clear about. Otherwise, you may be exposing (or not exposing) the information you intend to.
The company has spent a lot of time communicating about the changes, and it has also been working to upgrade its help pages so people can find exactly what they’re looking for. You may already be familiar with the settings and the changes. But this comprehensive, step-by-step guide to 17 key settings might help you quickly spot what changes Facebook has made, and what changes you should make as a result.
If you haven’t been following the changes, here’s a quick explanation of what Facebook is doing. Facebook has always had pretty strict privacy rules by default. The service originally started on college campuses, and gradually branched out and grew. Today, more than 350 million people are active on Facebook each month around the world. The company’s methods of managing privacy have changed, as well — you used to need to use your college’s email address to join, for example, and you used to need register with a regional network. Both of those features, and others, have been removed or heavily altered as the company has grown. Facebook’s overall strategic direction has been, for several years, to become more open. The latest changes pushed users to share their information more widely. Every single person on the site was asked to go through a step-by-step review of their privacy settings in early December, as we covered, with some features, like status updates marked to be open to more people than what users have have previously designated them…(See full post here)
