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Wed, 02 Dec 2009 Facebook offers open letter from founder Mark Zuckerberg, plans changes

Changes ahead as Facebook hits 350 million users

Nick Spence

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Facebook has issued an 'An Open Letter from Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg,' updating users on the popular social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them.

"It has been a great year for making the world more open and connected. Thanks to your help, more than 350 million people around the world are using Facebook to share their lives online," writes Zuckerberg.

Facebook's work to improve privacy continues today insists Zuckerberg as the service has grown dramatically over the last five years.

"Facebook's current privacy model revolves around "networks" — communities for your school, your company or your region. This worked well when Facebook was mostly used by students, since it made sense that a student might want to share content with their fellow students."

"Over time people also asked us to add networks for companies and regions as well. Today we even have networks for some entire countries, like India and China."

"However, as Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and we've concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy. Almost 50 per cent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us. If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information."

"The plan we've come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone."

"We're adding something that many of you have asked for - the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In addition, we'll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings. If you want to read more about this, we began discussing this plan back in July."

Since the update will remove regional networks and create some new settings, in the next couple of weeks Facebook will be asking users to review and update privacy settings adds Zuckerberg.

"We've worked hard to build controls that we think will be better for you, but we also understand that everyone's needs are different. We'll suggest settings for you based on your current level of privacy, but the best way for you to find the right settings is to read through all your options and customize them for yourself. I encourage you to do this and consider who you're sharing with online."

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Comments received


JonClark2 said on Wed, 02 Dec 2009

I still don't understand why the default Facebook setting is to have all your privacy options turned ON and the user then has to manually turn them off as he/she desires.

Dragonfly said on Wed, 02 Dec 2009

@JonClark2

I still don't understand Facebook :-)

benny said on Wed, 02 Dec 2009

Facebook just collects data

Anthony said on Wed, 02 Dec 2009

Making the world more open? They define closed book.

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