Sigh... More Work for those who care to be Private on FB...

New article from All Facebook discusses the changes that FB is making. My thoughts are... this sounds like a lot of work. So the idea is that it opens our Facebook profiles to the public (some people may want this, some younger people may not realize the implications of this, some people use FB to reach as many as they can...). Now, even if you're not friends with the person, you can tag them in a photo... so Part 1 is they are making the social network pubic. So the remedy to their plan... for those of us that don't want pedophiles looking at their daughter on their Cancun vacation or for those of us who care about their businesses and don't want others to see ridiculous Bay to Breaker photos or for those of us who simply don't want every idiot out there knowing everything about our lives... are simply going to have work harder to protect themselves. 

So the Part 2 of this is now more controls. What used to be groups we could lump people into to easily share or not share info (similar to Google +), we will loose. As of Thursday those are gone. We now have to control for every post, every tag, every link, and every comment or like. And this means, more email notifications as well. Facebook taking our information and going public with it means more work for those who wish to remain private.

For businesses this is great, you can now spam more people and get in front of people you're not connected to. For us, getting spammed is never fun. My personal feeling on all of this is, "really? more work?". I am already embarrassed by how much time I poke around on FB as it is, now I have to spend more time managing it, maintaining it, and monitoring it. 

The changes go into effect on Thursday. Do what you will with FB, but I think it's making me step away from my lap top ...  Not sure if I am going to commit social suicide yet (see article) but I think a new strategy will soon be implemented for my own personal sharing medium.

The changes attempt to make the privacy settings more accessible and user friendly.

Big Changes

Here’s a list of the major improvements.

• The privacy settings are moving toward individual post windows and profiles.
• Users are gaining the ability to approve tags of themselves in others’ posts and photos.
• All tags will include an attribution of the person who did the tagging.
• Places no longer require physical check-ins, so people can add locations to posts, even from the desktop.
• You don’t need to be friends with someone to tag them in a post or photo.
• You don’t have to like a brand to tag it in a post or photo.
• Facebook has changed the word “everyone” to “public” in privacy settings, for clarity.
• You can customize privacy, or visibility of information, on a post-by-post basis.
• Users can edit the visibility of individual bits of content anytime after they post.
• The changes don’t affect mobile users, at least not for now.