Introducing the New Privacy Basics – Facebook (Jan 26, 2017)
Facebook’s busy week for news continues. This update to Facebook’s privacy mini site is timed to coincide with Data Privacy Day later this week, but it’s a useful reminder of how far Facebook has come on privacy. Facebook has always had two distinct privacy issues. One is the same that affects all ad-based companies: gathering lots of information about users and using it to target advertising. The other, however, has always been more Facebook-specific, which is that users have often been unaware of how broadly their content was being shared with other users and potentially the general public. It’s come a long way on both points, but especially the latter one. The new Privacy Basics site has lots of information about how to exercise more control over how posts get shared and with whom, and Facebook has done a nice job here. The fact that there are 32 separate interactive guides is perhaps unintentionally funny – protecting your privacy on the service can still be a complex proposition – but at least Facebook is now effective at walking users through some of that complexity. And in general it now does much better at being transparent and reminding users about how they’re sharing, and most importantly seems to have stopped deliberately or merely carelessly getting users to share more broadly than they intend to.
via Facebook
The company, topic, and narrative tags below will take you to other posts with the same tags. The narrative link(s) will also take you to the narrative essay which provides additional context behind the post.
Vote for or share this post
Use the Like button below to vote for this post as one of the most important of the week. The posts voted most important are more likely to be included in the News Roundup podcast episode I do each week. Or use the sharing buttons to share a link to this post to social networks or other services.