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.
This recent update provides another option for public figures who want to connect with a wider audience as well as those folks who enjoy openly sharing their online activities. These privacy settings which can be used to make parts of your personal profile public should not be confused with Facebook's new "Public Profiles." We examined Public Profiles last week and determined that they still had a number of issues before they would be useful to people with personal accounts. In fact, those Public Profiles were really only effective for businesses or other large entities that wished to communicate with a large audience.
Now, with the new privacy settings for Facebook personal profiles, individuals have another, and perhaps better, option than those Public Profiles. On your privacy page, you can now choose 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 doing so, anyone who finds you in a search or sees you in a post or comment on their friend's profile can click through to see what parts of your profile you've chosen to reveal. In other words, you can selectively make whatever you want public while still hiding the rest.
It should be pointed out that this new option, while useful, does not allow for one-way friendships where one Facebook user could follow another without having a mutual friendship. For micro-celebrities, celebrities, and other persons of interest, this still does not resolve the issue of wanting to broadcast to a crowd through News Feed updates while keeping some things private. For that, the only recourse is still the separate and somewhat difficult to maintain "Public Profile" pages. Hopefully, Facebook will still consider implementing truly one-way friendships where individuals can both publicly share content and broadcast to those who wish to follow their news. This most recent update to the privacy settings would be a good first step in that direction.
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Yes, if by "public" you mean logged into Facebook. Hahaha FAIL!
Solution in 3 easy steps:
1) Tweet all of your public posts in Twitter.
2) Um.... there is no step 2!
3) See step 2.
Twitter is the new Facebook!
Good attempt by FB -> I don't think it addresses fully the reason why people use Twitter vs. FB Status feeds though.
Good point about one way follows - I think that functionality is critical to the success of making the profile's more public.
I'd use it if I could publish just my Twitter tweets to my public Facebook!
You've long been able to use the privacy controls to make portions of your profile open to everyone on Facebook. Numerous stories have been written on this in the last few months. Using "customize" you choose "everyone."
There are still no privacy controls around comments. If you comment on someone else's post or content, you have no way to control or even know who can see your comment.
For statuses and wall posts, that means potentially "everyone" on Facebook.
For photos, videos, and notes... that means potentially the entire internet.
Facebook is TOAST. They know it as well and that is why they are copying Twitter in every way possible. It's a move that looks weak and desperate on Facebook's part. That is why they are also buying Press and Blog write ups to try and get some attention on a service that is old, closed, bloated, and boring.
The Facebook Private profile viewer is the reason I use twitter because anyone can view your profile via this web site
Actually, with the Twitter-like redesign, status updates & links are combined. You can no longer set separate permissions for these two items.
This site has a comprehensive list of questions and answers on this topic: http://www.justaskgemalto.com/en/surfing
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I really don't like the new face book now that they have switched it up you can view private profiles with Facebook Profile Viewer
Read the facebook's terms and conditions in order to find out if there was a change in the terms and conditions recently. what they have done is similar to taking your contacts in your phone and sharing them with everyone else on there and from what i can tell they didn't give a clear and precise warning about this or an option out i believe this to be a major breach of the Data Protection Act here in the UK. from terms and conditions
"You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings. In addition:..." now if that wouldn't hold up in court, i'm not sure what would. facebook sold our private lives without asking... this is no different than stealing..
There's still ways to see private profiles, try:
Unlock and View Private Facebook Profiles
i want to open a new Facebook
People still use FaceBook? Wow, I thought it would be over by now!
-Alison