Today Facebook made an annoucement about some changes that will be rolled out over the next few weeks, focusing in on giving users a better understanding of exactly who will see anything that they post on their Facebook page.
Essentially what Facebook are doing is taking many of the individual privacy settings that were tucked away on a settings page and are bringing them forward so that each time you post a status update, comment on something or post a photo, you an immediately see or control who will have access to what you post.
It’s not a huge change, but basically when you add any content to Facebook you’ll see an Icon and Dropdown box which will give you fast access to control who sees what.
Additionally you’ll be able to go back to anything you’ve posted on Facebook and change who can see it.
The next significant change deals with Photos posted on Facebook. Previously if a friend posted a photo on their Facebook profile that tagged you in it, it was automatically posted in your Facebook profile.
This will now change so that users can opt to approve any photo they are tagged in…and decide if it will also appear on their own page.
Another change worth mentioning is to the popular “Places” feature that enables users to ‘check-in’ to a location, letting friends know where they are and what they are doing.
Facebook are now expanding that feature so that users will be able to tag a location in any post without actually having to be at that location.
The idea here is that people like to talk about places before they actually go there.
Overall I don’t imagine that we’ll see too many complains regarding the latest changes taht will be rolled out over the coming weeks, however you can’t keep everyone happy – especially when you have hundreds of millions of users to please. By bringing many of these sharing options forward, Facebook users will now have greater control over who they are sharing with and will command greater power over their own Facebook ‘space’.
