Facebook Privacy Day

By Joel Feder | December 9, 2009

Today Facebook officially launched their new privacy settings. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and founder of Facebook, posted a public letter last week on the site explaining why the privacy changes were happening. These are major changes and are not to be taken lightly.

The changes rolled out today to all 350 million Facebook users. Upon logging in, Facebook will prompt you to look at your privacy settings. From there you can either choose to change your settings and incorporate some of the new options or continue with your old settings. Compared to the old settings, the new settings are easy to understand, simple to navigate and user-friendly.

Along with making your privacy settings easier to manage, Facebook is also going more public. As previously blogged about, Facebook signed a deal with Bing to open up to real-time search. The concern was with the way privacy settings were implemented, many things could not be shown in real time searches. There is now an option called “everyone” for some of your privacy settings.

The ability to better control your privacy will overall make Facebook more open as a community. These changes will also play a key role in real time search implementation. This will all turn interesting quickly depending on how people choose their new privacy settings.