Privacy & Sharing overhauls in Facebook! What’s Your Say on this?

To sustain Leadership in the market, companies have to keep on adding something new in their offerings. Same is the case with social networking giant Facebook. To sustain Leadership in the social networking arena & to maintain popularity among its userbase, Facebook is adding something new to its product line every other day. Recently, it made some changes in its chat & notifications settings, which had a mixed response from the users, and now, Facebook has rolled out big time changes its privacy & sharing settings (few changes have been live & few would get live in the coming weeks).

1. changes to its sharing functionality, and
2. changes to privacy settings on user profiles.

These changes are done keeping in mind how you can share your content with others or how you want your content to be visible to others. These sharing changes would fall under two sections:

1. Tagging/Un-tagging
2. Status updates

Tagging/ untagging in Facebook posts

Tagging is a very interesting way to share your photos, videos & experiences with your friends. But it becomes too irritating when some-one tags you in something which you don’t want to be a part of. Now, you would have the option to approve or reject before the picture or video actually gets published. So, you can control people tagging you in their content. Also, you can now approve or reject when someone tries to tag your content, even if they aren't tagging you specifically. The major change in tagging option is of ‘tag anyone in your posts’, no matter you are friends with the person! Isn’t it interesting?

Shared with friends

This feature would make it possible for you to share your experience with a large group of people inspite of the fact that you are not friends with them. And you never know, once you share your experience with them, they can become your friend. So, with the Facebook tagging feature you can expand your social circle!

Shared with Custom

Another change is of ‘un-tagging’. We think that this is the most sought after option by the Facebook fans. Facebook has tried to improve this feature by providing more options like asking the photo uploader to remove the photo from your profile completely and blocking that person on Facebook.

‘Status Update’ has also come-up with few amendments. You can choose to share your update in three ways: share with public (previously everyone), with friends or customize your status update sharing. You can now decide to whom to share ‘What’s on your mind?’ (Never tell your boss what’s on your mind! :D )

Not only this, you can now add location & people to your Facebook updates. So, you can share your updates telling the world, whom you are with at that moment of writing the post & where! Now, you can add your location from anywhere, regardless of what device you are using.

Also, you can choose to add location to your photos, albums & videos. We must say these changes in sharing settings will make Facebook more user friendly, not sacrificing the privacy and fun to spend time with!

The biggest change to privacy option is the transfer of privacy controls from settings page to user profile page. Now, you can see the edit-settings option on the top-right side of your profile. The users need not jump on to cumbersome privacy settings tab to limit the visibility of photos and other things.

Also, the ‘View profile as’ option has also been shifted to your profile from privacy settings page. You can easily see how your profile appears to public & your friends.

View as Public

All these changes are again an attempt by Facebook to show the world, that when it comes to innovation, the company is always ready to play the game.

But, the game changers (customers/users) are always the king who decides the success & failure of the player!

So, let us know whether these changes in Facebook are what you desired for & whether you liked them or not?

This post was written with inputs provided by Neha Jain.