Despite all the ruckus that has been raised over Facebook‘s privacy issues to day, Facebook stuck to one of its most ominous features. That has finally changed now as Facebook defaults the privacy of user posts from ‘Public’ to ‘Friends.’
In simpler words, if you hadn’t tweaked the privacy settings of your individual posts, Facebook kept the setting to ‘Public’ by default. So if you weren’t aware of the privacy controls and shared any posts, it would become instantly visible to everyone. Since many people find it hard to grapple with the privacy controls of Facebook, privacy activists had long been calling on the company to default the setting to ‘Friends’ only, unless specified otherwise by the user.
Thankfully, after what seems like an eternity, Facebook has listened to this demand and conformed. Now if a user hasn’t specified the visibility of his/her posts, it would appear only to his/her friends by default. To initiate this change, Facebook will soon start asking its users to confirm a ‘Privacy checkup’ where their privacy preferences will be confirmed and implemented.
According to Facebook’s Privacy Product Manager Mike Nowak, “Sometimes when people share things on Facebook, they feel like that info is more public than than they wanted or more people than they thought can see their posts. A lot of us have had the experience of sharing something and unexpectedly having it be more broadly visible [than we desired].“
This marks a very clear change in Facebook’s policy where the prevalent wisdom had always dictated that over-sharing stuff was far better than under-sharing. Nowak now admits that “We think oversharing is worse than under sharing.” The change will ensure that unwitting users don’t end up sharing their personal info or photos with complete strangers under the default ‘Public’ setting.
Source: Facebook
[ttjad keyword=”all-in-one-desktops”]
