From now on, new users will be protected from mistakenly making public posts

May 22, 2014 13:59 GMT  ·  By

It’s hard to believe there are still people in the world that are not on Facebook, considering there are so many people on the platform, but it looks like that’s the truth. The company is trying to get everyone to fit right in and before they get acquainted with the privacy settings, it thinks it’s best if they don’t just share everything with the world.

On that note, the social network has decided to set sharing with friends as the default option for new Facebook users.

“While some people want to post to everyone, others have told us that they are more comfortable sharing with a smaller group, like just their friends. We recognize that it is much worse for someone to accidentally share with everyone when they actually meant to share just with friends, compared with the reverse,” Facebook writes.

This means that from now on, when new people join Facebook, the default audience of their first post will be set to Friends, and not Public, as it was up until now.

Those who post things for the first time will see a reminder to choose an audience for their first posts and if they don’t make the choice, it will automatically be set to Friends. Privacy settings for posts can be altered at any time, so if you feel like changing things up, you can always go back.

Furthermore, the company has decided to introduce a new and expanded Privacy Checkup for people that are already on Facebook, which will obviously also expand to new members.

“Over the next few weeks, we’ll start rolling out a new and expanded privacy checkup tool, which will take people through a few steps to review things like who they’re posting to, which apps they use, and the privacy of key pieces of information on their profile,” writes Facebook.

The social network also tries to remind people that there have been multiple changes rolled on the platform in the past few months. For instance, there are no reminders for public posting, which alert people when they try to post things publicly to make sure that’s what they want to do.

The audience selector has also been simplified and made more prominent so it’s easy to spot. The company also mentions the Anonymous Login feature that was announced quite recently, which allows smartphone users to log into apps without sharing personal information from Facebook so they can try out the tool.