Facebook to enhance privacy setting

PALO ALTO, USA: Popular social networking site Facebook said on Tuesday that it would be simplifying the privacy settings for the site by introducing a unified privacy page.

This move is an attempt by the company to ease the ability of users to control their information sharing over the website.

Facebook's chief privacy officer, Chris Kelly said, “We want to make sure we don’t create too many settings and too much complexity, to give people the power to share information as broadly or privately as they want over time.”

He further clarified that inclusion of this new feature doesn’t have anything to do with advertising and they are giving people control over the information that they’re choosing to share.

The new settings will give people greater control over what photos, updates and personal details they share with their friends, family and strangers on Facebook and, eventually, the wider Internet.

The earlier privacy setting included a long process, where users had to navigate page after page to exclude, if they want, certain people from seeing their photo albums, status updates or shared links.

The new settings includes a lock icon feature, where the users would be able to restrict their information sharing to their friends, friends of friends, members of professional or school networks or people on a customized list.

This new feature would be first tried on smaller user groups.

This change is seen as a move to compete itself with bigger counterparts such as Google, Yahoo.