Changes to Facebook: more privacy control, less regional identity

Facebook is introducing changes to its privacy settings, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced last night in a blog post that puffed the site’s recently-relased massive user figures and announced 3 major new changes.

1. An end to regional networks
Back when Facebook members were largely students it made sense to have specific networks for universities or schools. Now cities and even whole countries have their own “regional networks” for example there’s one for all of China. Several networks already have millions of users.
They’ve got too big to be useful so these are going to get cut.

2. Control Who Sees Each Piece of Individual Content You Add or Upload
More general privacy controls will be replaced with very specific option for each piece of information you upload. For example are your statuses open to everyone but your photos only open to friends of friends?
There will be three options for each item you upload: visible to friends; friends of friends; or everyone – and all the options will be more accessible as they pop up from a lock icon.

3. Setting your privacy controls will get simpler
The lock icon will bring privacy controls out of the backpages they languished on before, but the main privacy menu will get simplified as well. Don’t know the details yet, but we expect that will affect profile privacy, helping to differentiate between information like hometowns and favourite movies. It might offer some control over videos or photos that you have not uploaded but have been tagged in.

In some ways minor changes, they have stirred some resentment with members of regional networks getting upset at losing their status as members of particular schools or groups. Zuckerberg’s post has over 34,000 comments…