Think you had a tough week last week? While I’m not about to diminish your problems, I have to think they paled in comparison to the week that Facebook endured. Due to a massive scandal where approximately fifty million of Facebook’s 2.1 billion active users had their data collected without their knowledge or consent, the company lost fifty billion dollars in market share. A drop in the bucket, right? As you might imagine, Mark Zuckerberg and company aren’t too keen on losing money, and major financial and public opinion losses aren’t sustainable forever. #DeleteFacebook is becoming a movement. So, what did they do? Well, they went to work. Today, we’ll let you know about the changes Facebook users should expect to see in the very near future.
From Time magazine: “The priority, Facebook said, is making its privacy settings more accessible and providing clearer explanations about how data tools are used. ‘Last week showed how much more work we need to do to enforce our policies and help people understand how Facebook works and the choices they have over their data,’ Facebook vice president and chief privacy officer, Erin Egan, and vice president and deputy general counsel, Ashlie Beringer, said in a statement. ‘We’ve heard loud and clear that privacy settings and other important tools are too hard to find and that we must do more to keep people informed.'” In addition to these statements, the aforementioned Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, has apologized for the data mining, and agreed to testify in front of Congress regarding this controversy.
Facebook will begin implementing changes by overhauling the settings menu on mobile devices. All settings will be able to be accessed from a single page. Facebook has admitted that there are approximately twenty different pages that control all of your settings, so clearly this is an idea that’s been a long time in coming! Next, Facebook will launch a “Privacy Shortcuts” menu. On this menu, you’ll be able to control who can see your contact information, relationship status, posts, and more. The “Privacy Checkup” allows you to set the audience that will get to see future posts, control who has access to your phone number, e-mail address, birthdate, hometown, relationship, and work information, and also set the access level for apps that you’ve used your Facebook login information to sign in to. Finally, a new tool will allow you to download all of your Facebook activity for archiving on your computer, or permanently delete all of this data from your Facebook experience. If you don’t want to wait to download a copy of your activity log, you can do so by signing into Facebook on your computer. Next, click the dropdown arrow to the right of your notification area (friend requests, messages, notifications), then click on “Settings”. Under the “General Account Settings” header, scroll down and click on “Download a copy of your Facebook data”. Lastly, click “Start My Archive” to begin.
Facebook has been very apologetic since these findings have been brought to light, and now stress transparency and clarity. Will the changes they’re implementing be enough to stop a stampede from leaving the social network? Time will tell, but these new changes, which should have been in place since the beginning, are a good start.