How to make privacy work for everyone?

In order to refine Privacy, the privacy model has to work for people. It shouldn’t be people’s problem to manage the settings if they don’t want to. The settings should just exist in the right state for the experience they desire.

I view it as a design failure if we have to send someone to a settings page. That is putting the responsibility on the person using the service to fix the problem. The settings should be coming to you when you need them.

The Privacy team is focused on implementing this way of thinking and I would like to share with you a few examples.

Friend Requests

Sometimes you might end up with friend requests from people you don’t know and you don’t want those requests. Did you know there’s a setting for that? Most people don’t. Now, we surface this control in-line when you are ignoring requests.

Starting people at Friends

An important shift we made was to change the initial state of who you share with to be Friends instead of Public when you first join Facebook. Our research showed different cultures have varied preferences for this setting, but in the end, we decided it made the most sense to start the setting at Friends and protect people from over-sharing. We also encourage people to choose their audience on their first post so they are aware of how the control works.

Helping you post to the audience you want

If you usually post to one audience, we will now check in if you have the control set to a different audience before posting to make sure you are sharing with who you want.

Audience Selection

Choosing an audience might have seemed like an overwhelming task in the past. You were presented with six or more choices with very little hierarchy or visual distinction. We simplified the audience selectors and structured them to surface the most commonly used choices. We also explain who the audiences are and what the action of the selector does.