By Mike Swift, San Jose Mercury News
SAN JOSE, Calif. ó Facebook will launch a series of privacy upgrades on Thursday, giving users more control of how they share personal content, as well as the ability to limit some information their contacts can post about them.
Rather than forcing a user to dig into their settings menu to limit who can see a photo or status update they have shared, Facebook will put those menu choices directly on the controls of the post. Facebook will also begin allowing users to veto “tags,” or profile identifiers, on photos and posts shared by others. Users won’t be able to stop someone else from posting a photo of them or mentioning them in a post, but Facebook will allow users to block having their profile attached to the content.
“You have told us that ‘Who can see this?’ could be clearer across Facebook, so we have made changes to make this more visual and straightforward,” Chris Cox, vice president of product for Facebook, said in a blog post Tuesday.
“Your profile should feel like your home on the Web ó you should never feel like stuff appears there that you don’t want, and you should never wonder who sees what’s there. The profile is getting some new tools that give you clearer, more consistent controls over how photos and posts get added to it, and who can see everything that lives there,” Cox added.
The changes will start becoming visible to some users on Thursday, and will gradually roll out to Facebook’s more than 750 million users in the following days.
In the past, if users wanted their postings to be visible to anyone, they could set their privacy settings to “Everyone.” But Facebook is now changing the name of unlimited sharing.
“We are changing the name of this label from Everyone to Public so that the control is more descriptive of the behavior: Anyone may see it, but not everyone will see it,” Cox wrote in the company blog post. “This is just to make the setting more clear, and it’s just a language change.”
For the first time, Facebook will also allow users to change their mind after they post something, by either editing or deleting a post.
Some of the changes appear to echo many of the features built into the new, competing Google+ social network, where users are prompted to designate “Circles” of people with which can share content when they join the site. The two social networks have recently appeared to be engaged in a tight digital duel, with Facebook announcing a series of improvements to its gaming platform on the same day, for example, that Google+ launched games.
Google+ launched June 28, and a Facebook spokesperson said in an emailed response to this newspaper that the changes had been in the works for some time.
“We’ve been working on building these updates over the last few months and, as we said a few weeks ago, this is launch season and we’re ready to get it out of the door,” the spokesperson wrote.
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