Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg Announces Privacy Reforms

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

​Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a raft of privacy reforms today at the company's headquarters in Palo Alto in an effort to stanch outrage from the social-networking site's users over public availability of their profile information. Zuckerberg said the company will adopt three changes to its technology governing privacy settings:

• A simple display showing users who can view their profile: everybody, just your Facebook "friends," or friends of your friends.

• Control over which other Facebook users can see your page in the first place. The company reportedly will have a function that allows you to block your page from turning up in other customers' searches.

• The ability to completely turn off the site's controversial "instant personalization" feature, which allowed outside websites to access personal data on your Facebook page.

It will be interesting to see how these changes are received among privacy advocates, who earlier this month filed a formal complaint over Facebook's privacy policy with the Federal Trade Commission. The three-pronged approach laid out today by Zuckerberg already seems less simple than a Facebook-using layperson might like, although it certainly beats the mealy-mouthed explanations of the site's privacy policy that company executives have offered so far.

Photo   |   deneyterrio

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