Facebook enhance privacy settings – after pressure

Facebook have been under pressure lately to protect their users privacy and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has blamed the issues on ‘growing pains'.

Mark was keen to point out that engineers and designers have been working hard in the last three weeks to improve privacy settings. “We don't pretend that we are perfect” he said, following up with “We try to build new things, hear feedback and respond with changes to that feedback all the time”.

In the next few weeks changes will be made which mean that one click can can block any third party sites from tapping into the information held on any Facebook member. Additionally another easy to toggle setting will stop applications on Facebook reading into user information unless authorised.

Changes will be made to status updates and users will be able to put information such as video content into ‘buckets' specifically for just friends … or for everyone on the net if they want to share.

These changes have been made due to increased pressure from European and U.S. regulators over various privacy practices from Facebook and Google. Europe authorities told Microsoft, Yahoo and Google this week that their search engines aren't complying with privacy laws and have asked for details on whether they are making user information anonymous.

KitGuru: Big Brother is still watching you.

Discuss in our forums here or leave a quick comment below.

Become a Patron!