Mashable: Facebook Announces New Privacy Features

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Following weeks of debate over Facebook and privacy, the company is announcing new features to address the criticism that has emerged since the launch of the Open Graph and Instant Personalization.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg — who penned an op-ed in The Washington Post on Sunday promising new privacy options — is doing the presenting at a live event at the company’s headquarters.

After opening his presentation with a brief history of how Facebook and its privacy features have evolved, Zuckerberg described a number of upcoming changes to the social network.

Facebook isn’t going to remove the dozens of privacy controls that let you customize settings for very specific elements of your profile. However, the company is rolling out:

One simple control for changing content viewing permissions to friends-only, friends-of-friends, or everyone — it applies to everything you’ve published on Facebook in the past.
This setting will also apply to everything you publish in the future.
A simple way for determining how people can find you on Facebook, and what users that aren’t your friend can see.
A simple way for turning off the Facebook Platform, specifically, being able to opt-out of Facebook’s new instant personalization features and providing third-party sites with information.
A way to opt-out of sharing your friends list and the Pages that you like.

The theme here is clearly “simple” — an easier way to stop sharing information with people, websites and applications that you don’t want to have access. That said, it looks like instant personalization instant personalization will remain on by default.

The new privacy controls will go live in the next few weeks, and Facebook will be inserting a message on user homepages alerting them to the new options. Stay tuned to Mashable for more news and analysis on Facebook’s latest privacy moves.

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