Facebook undergoes radical overhaul of privacy controls

FACEBOOK is to radically overhaul its privacy controls amid global criticism of the social networking site.

In the coming weeks, Facebook, which has more than 400 million users worldwide, will add privacy controls described as “much simpler to use”.

Starting today, it has redesigned the privacy settings page; created one control for content; reduced the amount of information that is visible to everyone and provides more control over how applications and websites access your information. Facebook will also give users an easy way to turn off all third-party services.

Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, 26, said: “Many of you thought our controls were too complex. Our intention was to give you lots of granular controls, but that may not have been what many of you wanted. We just missed the mark.”

Writing in a column in The Washington Post earlier this week, Mr Zuckerberg, who co-founded Facebook while a student at Harvard in 2004, said “sometimes we move too fast” in making changes to Facebook.

In a keynote address to the company’s annual conference in San Francisco, yesterday, Mr Zuckerberg did not make clear whether the third-party services referred to applications designed to be used within Facebook, such as games, or to separate websites which have recently begun to incorporate Facebook data.

Several recent changes to its service prompted sharp criticism from privacy advocates and high-profile Facebook users in many countries began deleting their accounts in protest. European data protection officials called the earlier privacy changes “unacceptable”.

One feature called “instant personalisation,” which automatically imports Facebook users’ personal profile information to the music site Pandora, was the focus of many complaints.

Another recent change posted profile information of account holders, such as education and hobbies, to public pages devoted to those topics.

Facebook is a private company and does not disclose financial data. Industry analysts believe its 2009 revenue was somewhere between $500 million and $650 million, primarily from selling online ads targeted at users.