Facebook Updates Privacy Settings, Makes it User Friendly

Credit:Reuters

Facebook users have been constantly caught off guard when the popular social networking site makes changes to its privacy sets, and on Wednesday, the company announced further changes as it faces more scrutiny from privacy advocates.

"Surprises are very bad for users and very bad for us," says Samuel Lessin, director of product at Facebook. "We want people to have a lot of confidence in our platform."

The most noticeable, and probably most appreciated, change will be a new "privacy shortcuts" section that appears as a tiny lock on the right-hand side at the top of people's news feeds.

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This feature offers a drop-down box where users can get answers to common questions such as "Who can see my stuff?" and "How do I stop someone from bothering me?"

The company is also introducing a higher level of control on the site's Activity Log, a feature that allows people to hide or remove things that appear on their Facebook timeline. People will now be able to quickly view and control comments, photos and posts that have been tagged by others.

Users will also receive requests and have the option to remove tagged photos when you want them to disappear. By going to the "Photos of You" tab, you can now select multiple photos (instead of one at a time) and request that your friends remove the photos. The benefit of doing this, as opposed to simply removing them from your own timeline, is that your friends will hopefully respect your formal request and remove the photo (or photos) from all public view-not just your timeline.

"The tool also lets you untag multiple photos at once, keeping in mind that while untagged photos don't appear on your timeline, they can still appear in other places on Facebook, such as search, news feed, or your friends' timelines," Facebook said.