14 DAY TRIAL // As a response to the most recent privacy backlash, Facebook head of public policy Tim Sparapani announced in a radio show that the company would be offering users some new and more 'simplistic' privacy options within the following weeks. He said that this decision was caused by the fact that users had complained that the social network has become quite complicated, therefore the company would be working on fixing this by creating 'simplistic bands of privacy' that would be available to the public after a few weeks.
Needless to say, it is too early to know for sure the exact meaning of this announcement or whether the current users will also be able to enjoy them, but we can only hope that at least the new users will have more alternatives to choose from, others than the current ones. At present, the created accounts can be set to share a lot of types of information, including personal details, with third-party online services like Pandora or Yelp.
On the other hand, these future modifications might not make a great difference in the much-debated Facebook privacy matter, that started in December when the company chose to transform many parts of users' profiles into 'publicly available information.' In other words, setting a specific detail as hidden will not make it invisible to everyone, those who know where to look will still be able to locate it.
During a radio interview on Tuesday, Sparapani accepted some of the critics, but he also stated that the social platform still took interest in privacy, even though they had been attempting to encourage users to create more public accounts and at the moment had a very complicated and confusing privacy policy.
“We have built a privacy setting for every new type of sharing [users] are allowed to have,” he explained. “What that means is that in fact we have come up with an extraordinary number of privacy settings. This should be compared to almost any other company out there where there are no privacy settings at all,” Sparapani added. “So Facebook should be getting credit here for giving tools in the first place.”