Facebook’s New Privacy Settings

Facebook announced about their new Privacy Settings earlier today. Facebook says that the changes are made to simplify the Facebook privacy settings and give users more control,  but according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation these changes are made to push users to publicly share even more information than before.

For app developers these changes will be very useful. Users won’t be able to hide information such as gender and friend lists (and other Publicly Available Information – PAI) from apps, they can’t opt out of the Facebook API (by the “Do not share any information about me” setting) anymore and even if a user hasn’t granted permission to any apps the PAI of the user will still be available through the friends of the user who use the application.

According to Chris Cox (VP, Product Management) “everyone” will be the new default for status updates, which will make Facebook more like Twitter and give greater access to information for developers. This means if Facebook allowed Google to pull user status updates for its new real-time search,  Facebook could have replaced and even eliminated Twitter.

Below is a video demonstrating these new changes.