Skip to Main Content

A Guide to Facebook's New, Simpler Privacy Controls


If you haven't quit Facebook yet, then it's time to take another look at your privacy settings, which, as promised, are now less of a huge maze. Here's the lowdown on how to work the new system.

After a months-long privacy fiasco, Facebook has taken it upon themselves to revamp the privacy settings to make them simpler and quicker to set and forget. While the new settings are definitely easier to use, Facebook has thrown in a few surprises that the privacy-conscious may not be too happy with. Unfortunately—in some ways—with simplicity comes a lack of control, and Facebook has made sure that the control you don't have is over information that is made public.

Note: Facebook's new privacy settings will roll out to users over the next couple of weeks, so keep an eye on your Facebook page for a privacy prompt. When we're able to test the settings on our own accounts, we'll be back with our own recommendations.

Controlling What You Share with Other People

Instead of having a ton of different content categories to choose from, some of the previous categories have been combined. For example, "status, photos, and posts" are all now in one category, and you can choose to share them with everyone, friends of friends, or friends only.

There are some handy "quick links" on the side that allow you to set all your categories viewable to "everyone" or "friends of friends, as well as a quick setting for Facebook's recommended settings, pictured above. Of course, you can also customize it to your liking, picking your own privacy setting for each category. A nice green check mark shows which choice in the sidebar you're currently using, which makes it pretty easy to see what you're sharing.

Your Directory Information

The company has (seemingly) responded to criticisms about information that is automatically made public, like your pages and list of friends. When people search for you, they'll be able to see your name, profile picture, gender, and networks, so people can tell who you are when they search—and you don't have a choice on those pieces of information. You can choose who can find you, send you friend requests, messages, see your friend list, education and work, current city and hometown, and interests/other pages. Honestly, Facebook's "simplified" settings still seem to require a whole lot of effort.

Applications

Furthermore, they seem to have kept the "opt out" model as opposed to "opt in" as far as sharing your information with applications and other web sites. Again, though, it is simpler—now it's one single option instead of many. You can view applications, remove any you don't want, or turn off all applications completely, meaning none of your information will be shared.

By default, applications have access to any information that is set to public (i.e. information viewable in searches and information set to be viewable by "everyone"), and applications will ask your permission to view any private data when you install them. So, again, it's sort of an improvement, but it also seems like they're trying to pull a fast one on unsuspecting users by making the whole thing opt-out—another major complaint of the past few months that Facebook seems to have just ignored.

Block Lists

Lastly is your block list, which was already pretty simple, and has just been kept as its own setting. From here you can block friends and applications from your view; so you won't see their posts on your news feed or anywhere else.

What Hasn't Changed

There are a few things that are still around and should be familiar to anyone who's taken a look at privacy settings before. You can still set preferences on a post-by-post basis, so if your statuses are set to public but you have one status update that you only want your friends to see, you can just click the lock under the status update box. Also, you can control who can view photos and posts you've been tagged in, but you can't stop people from tagging you, which was one of the glaring features missing in Facebook's privacy settings before.

As we said, the new privacy settings will roll out over the next couple of weeks, so keep an eye out for a prompt on your Facebook page when you log in over the coming days. In the meantime, let us know how you feel about the changes in the comments.

Facebook Privacy Guide [via The Facebook Blog]