Facebook Updates Privacy Settings – Moves To Posts And Photos

Facebook has made a major change to the way security and privacy settings work, moving them away from the buried settings pages and directly onto each post and photo.

Summary of Changes:

The privacy settings are moving toward individual post windows and profiles.
Users are gaining the ability to approve tags of themselves in others’ posts and photos.
All tags will include an attribution of the person who did the tagging.
Places no longer require physical check-ins, so people can add locations to posts, even from the desktop.
You don’t need to be friends with someone to tag them in a post or photo.
You don’t have to like a brand to tag it in a post or photo.
Facebook has changed the word “everyone” to “public” in privacy settings, for clarity.
You can customize privacy, or visibility of information, on a post-by-post basis.
Users can edit the visibility of individual bits of content anytime after they post.
The changes don’t affect mobile users, at least not for now.

View Profile As

If you’ve got as far down the security road as grouping your friends into their own little units, and restricting some of these groups with less visibility than others (firstly, congratulations) then seeing the effect of these restrictions was pretty much impossible. Now however you can view your profile as any of these restricted groups and make sure that certain people can only see what you want them to – a great, and long overdue, feature.

Tagged in a Photo or Place you don’t want to be?

Previously people could tag you as checking in at a location or in a photo at will, leaving the onus on you to correct or opt out of this notification which in the mean time had you explaining you night out on the town checking at a pub when you’d claimed to be at home sick to a friend.

Now, by turning on the Review Setting you can approve all posts and photos that you are tagged in before they are sent public. You can also opt to decline a tag at a later date, removing yourself from a post or photo which presents three new options, first to simply remove the photo (as before), secondly you can automatically request that the person removes the photo, or thirdly you can permanently block the person that uploaded the photo which will also block future attempts at tagging you.