Facebook to set post visibility to friends for new users
Facebook is known for its notoriously complex privacy settings that even experienced users have a hard time configuring correctly.
One of the things that the company gets criticized for regularly is that the default visibility for posts made by new users is public which means that anyone, friend, foe and Joe can read those posts.
This is about to change though as the company has announced several improvements to the service's privacy system. One of those improvements are improvements made to the privacy checkup feature that it started to use a couple of months ago.
First time users will get a notification for instance when they are about to post the first status update on Facebook.
Hi name! Before you post, we wanted to make sure you're sharing with who you want.
Who would you like to see your posts? Friends Public
This falls in line with the announcement that the default visibility of posts for new users is friends from now on and no longer public.
Learn more and more options links lead to additional information that educate users about the impact of the visibility options they can choose when they post to Facebook.
The new Privacy Checkup tool offers to walk Facebook users through a couple of pages that explain how privacy works on Facebook and allows them to review how their privacy settings are configured on Facebook so that they can make changes to that directly from within the tool.
Another change in regards to posts that you make on Facebook is that the company decided to simplify the sharing options. It will only display public and friends by default, instead of lists, only me, friends except acquaintances or custom. Those options are only accessible with a click on the more options link.
The location of the audience selector was moved from the bottom toolbar to the top where it is now displaying the audience of the post prominently so that it is easier to understand with whom the post is shared.
You are probably wondering what reasons Facebook may have to implement those changes. While the company does not reveal any of those in the announcement, it is likely that there are several. First to silence some of the critics by adding new user-friendly privacy instructions to the site, and then also to get users to reveal more about themselves on the site.
If you do not understand who can read your updates, you may be inclined not to post them in first place. If you know that only the people that you have selected see them, you may be inclined to post them.
This is of course not valid for anyone, and it is likely that another group of users does not care about their post's visibility at all.
In related news: Facebook's mobile apps gets a new opt-in feature to automatically identify television shows or music playing in the vicinity to improve sharing on the site when a user starts to write a post.
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Martin, I would appreciate that you do not censor this post, as it’s informative writing.
Onur, there is a misleading statement “[…] GIFs are animated images …”. No, obviously you don’t seem to have take much notice of what you were told back in March regarding; Graphics Interchange Format (GIF).
For example, https://www.ghacks.net/2023/03/31/whats-gif-explanation-and-how-to-use-it/#comment-4562919 (if you had read my replies within that thread, you might have learnt something useful). I even mentioned, “GIF intrinsically supports animated images (GIF89a)”.
You linked to said article, [Related: …] within this article, but have somehow failed to take onboard what support you were given by several more knowledgeable people.
If you used AI to help write this article, it has failed miserably.
AI is stupid, and it will not get any better if we really know how this all works. Prove me wrong.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IYl1sTIOHI
Martin, [#comment-4569908] is only meant to be in: [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/07/09/how-to-send-gifs-on-iphone-two-different-ways/]. Whereas it appears duplicated in several recent random low-quality non relevant articles.
Obviously it [#comment-4569908] was posted: 9 July 2023. Long before this thread even existed… your database is falling over. Those comments are supposed to have unique ID values. It shouldn’t be possible to duplicate the post ID, if the database had referential integrity.
Don’t tell me!
Ghacks wants the state to step in for STATE-MANDATED associations to save jobs!!!
Bring in the dictatorship!!!
And screw Rreedom of Association – too radical for Ghacks maybe
GateKeeper ?
That’s called “appointing” businesses to do the state’s dirty work!!!!!
But the article says itself that those appointed were not happy – implying they had not choice!!!!!!
@The Dark Lady,
@KeZa,
@Database failure,
@Howard Pearce,
@Howard Allan Pearce,
Note: I replaced the quoted URI scheme: https:// with “>>” and posted.
The current ghacks.net is owned by “Softonic International S.A.” (sold by Martin in October 2019), and due to the fate of M&A, ghacks.net has changed in quality.
>> ghacks.net/2023/09/02/microsoft-is-removing-wordpad-from-windows/#comment-4573130
Many Authors of bloggers and advertisers certified by Softonic have joined the site, and the site is full of articles aimed at advertising and clickbait.
>> ghacks.net/2023/08/31/in-windows-11-the-line-between-legitimate-and-adware-becomes-increasingly-blurred/#comment-4573117
As it stands, except for articles by Martin Brinkmann, Mike Turcotte, and Ashwin, they are low quality, unhelpful, and even vicious. It is better not to read those articles.
How to display only articles by a specific author:
Added line to My filters in uBlock Origin: ghacks.net##.hentry,.home-posts,.home-category-post:not(:has-text(/Martin Brinkmann|Mike Turcotte|Ashwin/))
>> ghacks.net/2023/09/01/windows-11-development-overview-of-the-august-2023-changes/#comment-4573033
By the way, if you use an RSS reader, you can track exactly where your comments are (I’m an iPad user, so I use “Feedly Classic”, but for Windows I prefer the desktop app “RSS Guard”).
RSS Guard: Feed reader which supports RSS/ATOM/JSON and many web-based feed services.
>> github.com/martinrotter/rssguard#readme
We all live in digital surveillance glass houses under scrutiny of evil people because of people like Musk. It’s only fair that he takes his turn.
“Operating systems will be required to let the user choose the browser, virtual assistant and search engine of their choice. Microsoft cannot force users to use Bing or Edge. Apple will have to open up its iOS operating system to allow third-party app stores, aka allow sideloading of apps. Google, on the other hand, will need to provide users with the ability to uninstall preloaded apps (bloatware) from Android devices. Online services will need to allow users to unsubscribe from their platform easily. Gatekeepers need to provide interoperability with third-parties that offer similar services.”
Wonderful ! Let’s hope they’ll comply with that law more than they are doing with the GDPR.
No, they didn’t lmao.
https://twitter.com/vxunderground/status/1706523877478670542