Facebook announces plan to rescue your privacy, avert the Facepocalypse

May 26, 2010 - By Justin E. Gehrke

In an event held at the company’s New York headquarters today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to fix what the now infamous Facebook Social Graph broke. Responding to weeks of internet-based complaints and, even worse, congressional discussion, Zuckerberg explained that simplified options to configure privacy settings are in the works and should be rolled out within the next several weeks.

Following the obligatory remarks on the company’s evolution and growth, Zuckerberg got straight to the point and told people what they wanted to hear. In the official Facebook blog, Zuckerberg writes, “Today we’re starting to roll out some changes that will make all of these controls a lot simpler. We’ve focused on three things: a single control for your content, more powerful controls for your basic information and an easy control to turn off all applications.” Basically, this means that Facebook’s privacy settings will be fixed and the Facepocalypse can be averted. This of course means you won’t have to worry about securing your profile or, even worse, deleting it altogether.

What are the planned changes to the previous changes?

A single, simplified control that lets users decide who (only friends, friends of friends, or everyone) can view their content. This one control will apply to everything (past, present and future) that you publish on Facebook

Potential benefit: One-click privacy for your content.

Simplified controls that allows a user to opt-out of new features such as instant personalization and sharing of their information with third-parties

Potential benefit: One-click blocking of the release of your personal information

The ability to opt out of sharing your list of friends and liked pages, with others

Potential benefit: One-click privacy for you, your friends, and the stuff you like

Simplified controls to control how non-friends find you and what they can see

Potential benefit: One-click privacy from non-friends

When and how will the changes take effect?

As mentioned above, the changes should start to take effect within the next several weeks. One can be certain that today’s announcement follows weeks of work, in preparation for the changes. As is customary, Facebook will let users know when the changes go live, via the display of a message and/or the sending of an email to the account they used at the time of registration.

When they finally do roll out, we’re interested to know if you find them easier, worse, or just the same. Please take a few minutes to let us know via comment or through the contact page.

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Source: The Facebook Blog – Making Control Simple