In yesterday's post, I talked about the new way Facebook is managing privacy controls and pointed out a couple of issues I have with their new approach—primarily that there's no way to restrict some pieces of information that Facebook has unilaterally deemed to be public.

However, there's also one major improvement to the system.

Until now, Facebook has used an all-or-nothing approach to privacy settings for content that you post on the site. If you restricted your status updates to Only Friends, for example, then those would be the only people who could ever see any of your updates. But there might be occasions when you'd like to make some of your announcements visible to a wider audience. For example, if you wanted to post about an event that an organization you support is holding, you might want to get the word out to as many people as possible.

With the new controls, this is now an option. Access to your content can be restricted on a post-by-post basis. When you go to write something in your Publisher box at the top of your home page/profile page, you'll see a little lock icon in the bottom right area. When you roll over it, you'll see what the default setting is for posting this content.

If you're happy with that, you don't need to do anything else—that's the setting that will be applied. But, if you want to change it, you can click the arrow to be given more options.

If you select, Customize, you get another window that lets you specify which friends or friend lists to give or deny access to the content. You can also check the box to make this your new default setting.

Now when you click Save and then Share the content, this will be the privacy setting applied to that individual post. And if you want to remind yourself what setting you applied to a previous post, you can roll over the lock icon that appears under it.

Note: The privacy controls may be in different places for different types of content. For example, if you're writing a Facebook Note, you'll see a dropdown box at the bottom of the Write a Post screen, just above the Publish button.

I really like this granular level of control. Even if I don't make changes to my default settings often, I know there will be some occasions when I want to. For example, when I post a link to Tech for Luddites. :)

There may be other advantages to the new system as well that I haven't discovered yet. If I do, I'll definitely share them. In the meantime, I'd like to remind everyone again to take this opportunity to go through all your current default privacy settings and make sure they're what you want.

Posted in Facebook, How To, Privacy/Security, Social Media