Facebook’s Privacy Changes: Five Things to Know

Privacy has always been a source of controversy for Facebook as the social network has had to deal with criticism regarding its allegedly shady dealings handling members' information.

In a blog post on Tuesday, Facebook acknowledged this criticism and said it had made improvements. The company, which has more than 500 million users worldwide, is making it easier for members to know where their stuff is going.

Previously, users had to go to a privacy settings page. Now, they can personally privatize everything on their page with a scroll-down option next to everything that's on the profile or everything posted.

The changes, which will start rolling out in the coming days, will be introduced to users through a guided post. They involve wholesale changes for each member's profile as well as stuff that is tagged about everyone.

We hope these new tools make it easier to share with exactly who you want, and that the resulting experience is a lot clearer and a lot more fun, Chris Cox, Facebook's vice president for products, said in the blog.

Here are five things to know about the new Facebook Privacy settings.

• Personalized Profile Settings: Everything on your profile from your hometown to your latest photo album, will appear next to an icon and a drop-down menu. This menu will let you decide who sees this information: the public, friends or a custom group. Taking a page from Google+'s book, the drop-down will expand over time and include certain groups of friends. If you want to post a place where you're going and only want a group to see it - you can do that.
• Settings Page: The previous settings page, which acted as a place where all of your privacy was controlled, will now be reduced. Since everything is going inline, there's much less of a need for this settings page to have a bunch of controls.
• Photos: Before, any time someone posted a photo of you or a post with you in it, it went up automatically. If it was a photo of you naked, it went up. Now? You can change your settings to make every photo or post have to get your approval before going up. Also, before you couldn't tag someone you weren't friends with on Facebook. Now you can.
• View Profile As: This tool was hidden on the old privacy settings page and let you see how certain other people could see your profile. It's now in an obvious place on your profile.
• Language: Facebook is changing the everyone setting to public. There's a difference according to Cox. Anyone may see it, but not everyone will see it, he said in the post.

Follow Gabriel Perna on Twitter at @GabrielSPerna