I am not a big fan of letting my Facebook status and pictures out to the public hence the use of the highest privacy given by Facebook. Today they announced some new privacy changes, they are easier to follow and I am very satisfied. Don’t get me wrong I have nothing to hide, but I consider Facebook my safe haven and consider it to be the only place I could express myself without repercussions.  Not that I will say something that will affect my job but you never know who you could offended.

At the time of clicking continue to the next step you will be asked to update your privacy settings which basically remains the same unless you want to make some changes.

What does the new privacy announcement mean?

1. Better Control Over Who Could See Your Status.

For some time there was an option where you could control from the privacy settings who could see your status. Now the option is directly in the status bar so at the time of updating you could select from the various groups. In my opinion that is easier. Maybe that could help avoid conflict when certain people decide that it is in your best interest to share their  opinions.

2. Better Security Settings

I have seen first hand what someone could do when they hack into your account, not that this feature would help if someone actually got into your account. It at least makes you feel safer that the password has to be confirmed before making any changes.

3. Concise Settings for Applications

You have the options to select what you share and what your friends can share about you. If you did not know, some of the applications that your friends use and what you use has access to your information and your friends information. You could reduce how much of that information you want the applications to have access too. That could help reduce those ads for example the “your friend so and so took the IQ quiz and scored 110 take the test to see what your IQ is”.

4. Ability to Hide Friends

You could show up to 12 friends on your profile or none at all.  They actually changed it from showing no friends on your profile which is not so good, but I consider it a whatever. This is what my profile looks  like to others:

Facebook has also added a video that could help you better manage your privacy settings:

Even though I hate the things Facebook does at times, I have to commend them on the privacy.