Facebook announces privacy improvements
Facebook, one of the largest social networking sites and somewhat notorious on the privacy front, has been working on a turn about of their privacy approach.
Last week there was a message from the founder Mark Zuckerberg referencing earlier trials with improved tools and settings and stating:
The plan we've come up with is [...] to 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.
A press release was made today accompanied by a blog post highlighting:
- Adding Control For Each Item
- Simplified Privacy Settings
- Help In Choosing Settings
- Expanded Privacy Education
Privacy settings can be reached on: http://www.facebook.com/privacy/ it still feels quite complex to a casual user like myself, but adding more control is a good thing. Now onto getting security for the information you post online by default I guess.
--
Swa Frantzen -- Section 66
Comments
I myself have noticed slowness/intermittency of Myspace, who serve much of their content through Akamai. I wonder if Facebook use Akamai also. I noticed a problem some weeks back where Akamai-served content was loading slowly and there were many people complaining of a Facebook outage.
It has occurred to me that as more sites entrust their web service to CDN's (instead of everyone operating much of their own infrastructure), an outage of a CDN could have quite far-reaching consequences. It's interesting how people sometimes assume in such situations that "the whole Internet is down", for example the outage some months back of Google's search page.
I'd hate to think we'd ever find ourselves in a national emergency. One major ISP here in the UK uses much of the same infrastructure to serve television as well as Internet access, and the incumbent telephone network operator is migrating its exchanges to VoIP.
The problems today could be related to an earlier partial outage at LINX today (the London Internet Exchange).
Steven Chamberlain
Dec 9th 2009
1 decade ago