Social networking website Facebook today unveiled new privacy settings to give users greater control over who sees information on their personal pages.
The new privacy features will enable users to limit messages to a certain subset of friends, such as family members or co-workers.
In addition, regional networks such as “Ireland” will be removed and replaced with four basic control settings - "friends", "friends of friends", "everyone" and "customised".
Privacy settings for minors will continue to be more restrictive than those for adults. If a minor seeks to share information with “everyone,” the widest circle of people who will actually be able see that content are his or her “friends”, “friends of friends” and members of school or work networks he or she has joined.
The site’s users - which total more than 350 million - will be required to review and update their settings from today, giving them greater control over who sees each individual piece of content created or uploaded.
Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a blog post last week: “We'll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings”.