Facebook to focus more on privacy

BANGALORE, INDIA: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the social networking site is going for a privacy overhaul in the next few weeks. Soon, users will be able to selectively choose, on a per-post basis, who can see the content they post to the site.

In the open letter (http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2208562130), Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg stated that the regional networks would be removed completely to replace with a simpler model for privacy control. With this the user can set content available to friends, friends of the friends or everyone.

“... Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and we've concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy. Almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us. If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information,” said the letter.

“We're adding something that many of you have asked for - the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In addition, we'll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings. If you want to read more about this, we began discussing this plan back in July,” he added.

It is expected that the proposed changes will have a huge impact on the site's future, says The Washington Post.

Right now, most people don't share their content using the 'everyone' option that Facebook introduced last summer. If Facebook pushes users to start using that, it could have a better stream of content to go against Twitter in the real-time search race, the report added.

However, will Facebook implement all these things soon? After all the site had been discussing this since July!