Facebook's New Privacy Controls Encourage Openness

Today, Facebook announced new privacy settings which let you selectively open up portions of your personal profile to everyone on the Facebook social network. As an alternative to the new "Public Profiles" (formerly called "Pages"), these additional settings allow you to pick and choose which parts - if any - of your private Facebook profile are available for anyone to see. According to a company blog post, this means that now people won't need to friend you in order to view the content you want to make public.

Here's the Exact post from Facebook blog >>

One of the top priorities at Facebook is offering privacy controls that let you choose exactly what you share with whom. We have largely focused on enabling you to give access to your profile to people you confirmed as friends and people in your networks. While these controls remain important and a priority for us, many of you have explained that you also want to open parts of your profile to a wider audience. Starting today, you can choose to make your profile and any of your content available to everyone on Facebook.

None of your existing privacy settings have changed. This is an additional setting for those of you who wish to share with a broader audience.

Just go to your privacy page and change the settings you want to the new "Everyone" option. You can opt to make one or all of the following profile elements more open: Profile, Status Updates, Links, Wall Posts, Basic Info, Personal Info, Education Info, Work Info, Photos of You and Videos of You.

By changing your Profile setting to "Everyone", anyone who finds you through a search on Facebook or sees a post or comment you make can now click on your content and view the elements of your profile you've opted to make open. While some special rules remain in place about who can see your profile if you are a minor, people generally won't need to be friends with you or share a common network in order to view your content if you choose the new "Everyone" setting.

In the past, searching for friends you haven't seen in a while or someone who has a common name may have been difficult. You may have only been able to see their search listing and a small thumbnail version of a photo, if that. With this change, people can use the "Everyone" option and make it easier for you to find and connect to all the people you know.

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