You Can’t Hide Anymore – and other FB Privacy Changes!

Facebook is making more changes to their privacy settings, which is sure to confuse users even more. The biggest change? You can’t hide anymore. Everyone will be searchable. If you want to stay private, you’re out of luck.

In changes that have been written about on Mashable, Reuters, and the New York Times, Facebook is once again tweaking its privacy controls. Here’s a summary of changes:

• You can no longer make yourself unsearchable. This is bad news for the millions of people who wanted to keep their social activity invisible to the world, and even worse for parents who wanted to keep their kids’ accounts visible only to people that know they are there!
  • A new Privacy icon will be added to the upper right, allowing quick access to some frequently-used controls:
    
    • More control in your Activity Log
      • Easier ability to request pictures of you to be removed
        • Apps must now ask separately for the ability to use your private information and to post to your Timeline. Previously these two privileges were lumped together.</ul> Users had the ability to vote and reject the changes, but almost no one did. And along with that came the new rule that users would no longer have the ability to vote on changes like these.

        So, to sum up:

        • You lost your ability to be unfindable
          • You gained some minor privacy controls
            • You lost your ability to have any input on future changes</ul> Overall a loss for users, in my opinion. Unfortunate.

            – Matt Kruse, author of Social Fixer