Facebook drops regions to boost privacy

Facebook is set to ditch regional settings as it looks to boost privacy on the site.

Founder Mark Zuckerberg has sent an open letter to Facebook users, explaining the changes.

Essentially, users on the site can choose a region to be a part of such as a city or country. The model grew out of Facebook's origins at universities, where students were part of their school's network. When the site expanded, it created regional networks to mimic those.

"However, as Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and we've concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy," Zuckerberg said, adding the site now has 350 million users.

At a meeting in London this morning, Facebook's director of privacy and policy Richard Allen noted how the regions system confused some users, as they didn't realise content made available to a given region could be seen by millions of users.

"If you're in Australia, the Australia network is the whole of Australia," he said, adding London has several million users on its network.

Allen noted that the regional setting was what caught out the wife of the MI6 head. She posted a picture of her spouse in swimming trunks, leading to his identification and causing a security uproar.

"That happened because of this misunderstanding around the regional networks," Allen claimed.

Sending your status to one person

The new plan is to remove all regional networks and roll out new privacy controls, where every single item posted has its own settings. Users will be able to allow everyone or just one single user to see bits such as a status update or photos.

"In future, you'll be able to post up a status update and say everything from 'I want this to go to everyone in the whole world' and a lot of people like to use Facebook that way down to 'I want this to just go to John Harvey [Facebook's sales director], or to a list which is my family, but not these other people'," Allen explained.

"We're offering users as granular control as we can give them," he added.

Facebook will also tweak its privacy settings page to make it easier to use, Zuckerberg explained, adding that the site will prompt users to update their settings over the next few weeks.

"It's the biggest exercise in getting users to exercise their control over their privacy settings we think anyone's done anywhere because all 350 million users are going to be asked to afirm the privacy settings that they want for their content going forward," Allen said.

Read on for more of the privacy challenges facing Facebook.