Facebook has once again made changes to their privacy settings following updates to their privacy policy yesterday. The revisions are designed to simplify the process of deciding who gets to see certain content posted on your Timeline, as noted by director of product for Facebook Sam Lessin in a blog post earlier today.
The social network initially came under fire over privacy concerns a while back. Facebook ultimately updated their privacy settings to appease worried users but what they came up with was something CNET called a bloated process.
The revised settings are roughly the same as before except Facebook is removing a feature that grants members the ability to block others from searching for their profile within the site. Lessin said this feature was useful early on when Facebook was limited to college students but it is very limited in scope and no longer prevents people from finding others in different ways across the site.
Otherwise everything else is just a cosmetic makeover designed to make it easier to navigate and understand what the various options actually do. Either way, it's described as the biggest overhaul to the site since they changed things around in August.
Nicky Jackson Colaco, a member of Facebook's Privacy Team, told the publication that privacy settings should be meaningful and actually protect people instead of just giving them a false sense of security.
In addition to the privacy changes, Facebook took the opportunity to make several other changes including adding tutorial messages for privacy actions, adding a privacy settings shortcut menu, the ability to untag multiple photos at once and more explicit app permissions.