Facebook has been known to be a place where sharing have limitless boundaries. For years, the social network giant urges users to share more and more, giving less space for internet privacy. But on Thursday, May 29th, 2014, the company announced that it will make it easier for users to share less.
Facebook is changing the default sharing setting for new users to friends only, instead of public, and make it easier for its over a billion users to monitor and change their privacy settings.
To maintain its popularity, Facebook needs its users to trust the company to protect their data. If users don't trust the social network, nobody wants to buy ads.
"We think this is taking our responsibility seriously to make sure people have control over who they are sharing with," said Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to Facebook shareholders at the company's annual meeting. "Over time, we think that is going to serve everyone who is using Facebook better and help us achieve our long-term goals."
Facebook that launched its Open Graph protocol in 2011 F8 Conference to allow developers to create apps where users can post their activities to the social network without constantly being interrupted, has its feeds over-flooded. Users are less likely to click or interact to these posts.
These posts, beside than just being annoying to most users and consume resources, they also aren't great for user experience because 75 percent of them are marked as spam. Facebook changed its News Feed algorithm so auto-shared stories are reduced.
Facebook isn't really giving up on auto-sharing feature; it just doesn’t want to show users that "annoying" post from third-party apps that are permitted to post on its News Feed. This means that when users open a "share to Facebook" window in a third-party app, add their own description, then post it to the News Feed, more of their friends are likely to see it. If they simply enabled a setting that auto-shares to Facebook every time they do something, those posts are less likely to appear to their friends.
If the feed gets boring, no one will read it, and it won’t matter what apps are there to share. Facebook is changing its game to create a better place for its users, and solving issues that come with privacy concerns.
And besides that, Facebook needs its users to trust the company to protect their data to maintain its popularity. If users don't trust the social network, nobody wants to buy its ads.
The announcement comes just weeks after Zuckerberg said that Facebook would enable users to interact anonymously with third-party apps.
In a statement about the privacy changes, Facebook said: "We recognize that it is much worse for someone to accidentally share with everyone when they actually meant to share just with friends, compared with the reverse."
Over the next few weeks, users will see an "expanded privacy checkup tool" that will take them through a number of steps in order to remind them who they're sharing their posts to and who can see the bits of personal information on their profiles.
The changes are expected to address complaints from users who were wondering how public their profiles were because they learned that some bits of their personal contents were shared to public. Among the changes Facebook rolled out are clearer designations on posts about with whom the information is being shared.
However, Facebook will still collect the auto-shared data about its users, which it could use to target advertising. And that data will still appear in users' Facebook profile.
The new move also extends Facebook's plan to clean up its News Feed, making it more personal, relevant and less susceptible like-baiting posts ("Please Like this!"). Although Facebook maintains a good relationship with developers, the social network is showing that user experience still comes first.
The new update is an addition to other updates Facebook did in the recent weeks: audio-recognition feature and the "Ask" button.