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Released: May 27, 2010

Facebook revamps privacy settings

Source: Cecilia Kang, Washington Post (Free Registration)

Facebook’s founder presented new one-click options Wednesday to help subscribers protect their privacy, responding to a torrent of complaints that it had become far too hard to determine and control levels of protection.

In a news conference, Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg chalked up recent stumbles to growing pains. He said that engineers and designers had holed up in a conference room in their Palo Alto offices over the past three weeks to work on new privacy settings.

The changes, which will be introduced over the next few weeks, mean that one click can block any third-party sites from tapping into Facebook’s goldmine of data on a user. A similar one-click option will allow a user to stop applications on Facebook from tapping user information unless told otherwise. And in a reversal of a confusing feature introduced in December, users will be presented with simpler options on who gets to see information.

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