We know that Facebook has been facing (no pun intended) a consumer and government backlash against its privacy settings. The world’s most powerful social network has been quick to react and repel any rebellion among its 400 million or so account holders. It is also keen to point out that it doesn’t sell any personal information with advertisers. Below are the details of what is has put in place, courtesy of Facebook’s UK communications office. As the social web matures, this is the first major test of what will become its most significant issue i.e. as first generation social networkers mature, how much more protective of their privacy will they become?
Facebook has:
·         Completely redesigned the privacy settings page to be much more simple.
·         Created one control for content. A new simple control makes it easy to share on Facebook with friends, friends of friends or everyone—all with just one click. 
·         Significantly reduced the amount of information that is always visible to everyone. Friends and Pages (your connections) can now be restricted to anyone you want. To help people recognise you, your name, profile picture, networks, and gender are always open to everyone (though half of these you don’t need to add).
·         Given you more control over how applications and websites access your information. “Now you can completely turn off Facebook Platform applications and websites, which means that your information will not be shared with applications.”
·         Get a better understanding of how you like to share on Facebook. “The new presets help us understand the overall privacy level you’re comfortable with for the things you share. So, if you choose the ‘Friends Only’ preset for ‘Sharing on Facebook’, new products that have privacy settings will be automatically set to ‘Friends Only’ as well.”
·         “Not changing anything about our advertising programs: we never sell any of your personal information to anyone. There’s a rumour that the more openly you share your information the more money we make, but it’s just wrong. Advertisers may target ads to people according to certain demographics, but they receive only anonymous data reports. We don’t share your personal information with our advertisers,” says the company.

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