Facebook announced plans to make its privacy control settings easier to find this month, and now a series of new menus and notifications has begun to roll out to users of the social network, initially in New Zealand.
The changes are designed to give users easier access to and awareness of ways that they can control the privacy of their information on the site. A new privacy shortcut menu has been added to the main bar that runs across the site. There’s also a new ‘privacy settings and tools’ page that displays a simplified overview of privacy options and lets users opt out of having content from their Timeline indexed by search engines.
As of today, users in New Zealand have got the new settings which match up to the preview screenshots posted by TechRival .
The new message below greets users as soon as they land on Facebook.com. That’s designed to ensure that all of them are made aware of the new settings and, in particular how they can block users who are bothering them.
The menu bar itself is positioned in between the ‘home’ and ‘settings’ icon on Facebook’s top menu bar. It drops down to reveal a range of options that help show which data from the social network is shown publicly, while providing quick-settings to change privacy options and a link to the fuller settings page.
That latter link leads to the privacy settings and tools menu which lays things out clearly. Here the option to prevent search engines from linking to a Timeline is included alongside a bunch of other options to simplify and control data.
In short, this is a move that will go some way to cutting through the clutter and confusion of Facebook’s numerous menus and settings, but there is still more work to be done. Plenty of settings are still hard to find including, crucially, the option to view your profile from the perspective of another users — which clearly shows what data is publicly available
Privacy has long been a sore point for the social network, and that’s largely down to the fact that it has built up a formidable amount of information about each of its 1 billion plus users. Back in November 2011, it was ruled in the United States that Facebook would face 20 years of privacy audits from the Federal Trade Commission due to what CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted were “mistakes” in its handling of privacy issues, and that’s sure to have influenced its latest action.
Nonetheless, the company is looking to taking positive steps forward with these new, more visible controls and we can likely expect things to evolve further on the privacy front.
Speaking to Facebook’s manager of privacy and safety, Nicky Jackson Colaco, said that the new settings would be released before the end of the year, and that the first step has already been taken. The US social network often uses New Zealand as a test-bed for new features and functionality and, at this stage, the new controls do not appear to have reached Australia, the US or the UK — three markets that would be part of any worldwide roll-out.
We’ve reached out to Facebook for clarification on its schedule for taking the privacy controls worldwide.
