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Facebook's 'Privacy Checkup' Gives Publicly-Posting Users Prompts to Change

TMCnet Feature

April 10, 2014

Facebook's 'Privacy Checkup' Gives Publicly-Posting Users Prompts to Change

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By Steve Anderson
Contributing TMCnet Writer

Facebook (News - Alert) is a great place to both keep up with and follow the various developments in the lives of old friends and family. It's also proving to be a valuable marketing tool for businesses of all sizes. But by like token, it's proving to be an increasingly problematic area, especially since potential employers are starting to use Facebook as more of a cheap, voluntary background check source. But Facebook seems to be getting a bit more sensitive to its own status, and is set to bring out what's being called a “privacy checkup” service to give users a bit better understanding of just how far the information said users post goes on the service.


The privacy checkup service is said to be just part of a larger overall initiative to help users take better advantage of the various privacy settings offered by the website. Facebook took its cues from a recent privacy survey issued to 4,000 people a day in fully 27 different languages, and used the results of said surveys to make its privacy picture a little brighter for the user. Reports put Facebook as previously admitting that the company previously hadn't exactly done its utmost to educate users about privacy controls on the site, and how to control said privacy. Thus, according to Michael Nowak, privacy product manager for Facebook, the company is changing how it thinks about privacy overall, going from “a set of controls or settings” to “a set of experiences that help people feel comfortable.”

In something of a departure from 2010 remarks from CEO Mark Zuckerberg (News - Alert) that said privacy was no longer “a social norm,” Facebook is stepping up its privacy operations, creating two teams specifically for handling privacy issues and detailing said teams to handle settings and security across the site, as opposed to just letting each individual product team handle privacy matters. The company now performs a reported 80 trillion checks every day to keep data leaks out of the picture as much as possible, making sure that user posts are only visible to those people to which the user selects said posts be made available. Further, the “audience selector” on the iPhone (News - Alert) version of the Facebook app will be moved to the top left instead of just above the keyboard, making it more noticeable and leaving users better able to select just where a post goes.

It's the kind of development that users will no doubt welcome; while there's something to be said for keeping posts between friends, it's also important to note that some users may post publicly whether other users would necessarily like that or not. Having a social media image that projects sound basic principles of life—no keg stands or the like—is to a user's advantage in the outside world, so much so that some have turned to “curated profiles,” the ones that can be freely handed out, while actual profiles are kept more quiet. It's a strange development, but one that seems increasingly necessary in our connected society. Facebook's efforts to help keep user profiles quiet, meanwhile, should prove just as helpful in the long run.




Edited by Alisen Downey


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