[IRP] privacy:: An Open Letter from Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg

[Max Senges]

quite interesting:

by Mark Zuckerberg <http://www.facebook.com/zuck?ref=blog> Yesterday at
3:23am
 It has been a great year for making the world more open and connected.
Thanks to your help, more than 350 million people around the world are using
Facebook to share their lives online.

To make this possible, we have focused on giving you the tools you need to
share and control your information. Starting with the very first version of
Facebook five years ago, we've built tools that help you control what you
share with which individuals and groups of people. Our work to improve
privacy continues today.

Facebook's current privacy model revolves around "networks" ? communities
for your school, your company or your region. This worked well when Facebook
was mostly used by students, since it made sense that a student might want
to share content with their fellow students.

Over time people also asked us to add networks for companies and regions as
well. Today we even have networks for some entire countries, like India and
China.

However, as Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have
millions of members and we've concluded that this is no longer the best way
for you to control your privacy. Almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are
members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us. If we
can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even
more control of their information.

The plan we've come up with is to remove regional networks completely and
create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be
available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.

We're adding something that many of you have asked for ? the ability to
control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In
addition, we'll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the
privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings. If you want to
read more about this, we began discussing this
plan<http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=101470352130> back
in July.

Since this update will remove regional networks and create some new
settings, in the next couple of weeks we'll ask you to review and update
your privacy settings. You'll see a message that will explain the changes
and take you to a page where you can update your settings. When you're
finished, we'll show you a confirmation page so you can make sure you chose
the right settings for you. As always, once you're done you'll still be able
to change your settings whenever you want.

We've worked hard to build controls that we think will be better for you,
but we also understand that everyone's needs are different. We'll suggest
settings for you based on your current level of privacy, but the best way
for you to find the right settings is to read through all your options and
customize them for yourself. I encourage you to do this and consider who
you're sharing with online.

Thanks for being a part of making Facebook what it is today, and for helping
to make the world more open and connected.


Mark Zuckerberg
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.internetrightsandprinciples.org/pipermail/irp-internetrightsandprinciples.org/attachments/20091204/41627915/attachment.htm>