Posts Tagged ‘Facebook Apps’
Social Networking Website Facebook Redesigns Privacy
Facebook, today, responded to user comments and concerns about privacy by announcing it will introduce simpler and more powerful controls for sharing personal information. New settings will give the more than 400 million people who use Facebook the power to control exactly who can see the information and content they share, all with just a few simple clicks. In addition, new settings will be added to make it easier to turn off third-party applications or websites. Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg officially announced the changes in a blog post.
The company’s new privacy controls reflect wide-ranging and collaborative consultation with the office of Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) and a number of online privacy and consumer advocacy groups. Zuckerberg first announced Facebook’s intention to make these changes that detailed principles by which Facebook operates:
• People have control over how their information is shared.
• Facebook does not share personal information with people or services users don’t want.
• Facebook does not give advertisers access to people’s personal information.
• Facebook does not sell any of people’s information to anyone.
• Facebook will always be a free service for everyone.
Today’s announcement focuses on the first two of these principles.
Making Control Simple
One control for content: A new simple control makes it easy to share on Facebook with friends, friends of friends or everyone—all with just one click. The corresponding settings are immediately applied and displayed in an easy-to-understand grid. At the same time, Facebook has maintained its more granular settings for those who want to customize their level of sharing. These settings now all appear on a single page for easier access.
Retroactive control: People who choose the more restrictive “Friends Only” or “Friends of Friends” options with the simple control will have the corresponding setting for all the content they posted previously for sharing. Thus, a person can make all the content they’ve ever shared on Facebook more private with just a couple of clicks.
Future products: Facebook commits to carry over people’s privacy choices for new products that facilitate sharing. Thus, if someone chooses “Friends Only” for “Sharing on Facebook,” new products that have privacy settings will be automatically set to “Friends Only.” This means Facebook users don’t have to worry about new settings in the future.
Prioritizing simplicity: Granularity of control has always been a primary objective in Facebook’s privacy design. Starting with the changes announced today, the company will also prioritize ease-of-use in its privacy design.
Fewer privacy changes: Facebook’s goal is to make privacy-related changes with less frequency and to work within the framework announced today as it continues to innovate new features and products.
Less Publicly Available Information
Significantly less public information: Facebook has drastically reduced the amount of information that is available to everyone. This information is now limited to Name, Profile Picture (should a user choose to have one), Gender (though this can be hidden on the profile), and Networks (should the user join any).
Privacy controls for Pages: Connections to Pages, which were previously available to everyone, will have privacy settings that work for both ends of the connection. People can prevent others from seeing Pages on their profile and from seeing them in the “People who like this” boxes on the Pages themselves. Applications will also need to ask for explicit permission in order to access any of your Pages that are not visible to everyone.
Easier Opt Outs
Full control over how applications and websites on Facebook Platform access information: In response to requests, Facebook has added a simple way for people to completely turn off Platform applications and websites, so that your information is not shared with applications, even information available to everyone.
Easier opt-out of Instant Personalization Pilot Program: Facebook has also made it easier for people to turn off the instant personalization program, which prevents those, and any future, applications in the program from accessing their information.
Granular data permissions for applications and websites: Facebook also highlighted the new controls users have over information shared with applications and websites on Facebook Platform. With the new data permissions model, applications must obtain specific approval before gaining access to any personal information that a user has not made available to “Everyone.”
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Farmville Food Coming to 7-Eleven Stores
Just when we hear Farmville is leaving Facebook, it starts invading our offline lives.
This week, reports about Farmville splitting from Facebook and launching on its own portal, farmville.com, have got us all excited. News that we’ll soon be seeing Farmville drinks and snacks on the shelves in 7-Eleven? Not so much. It’s all part of a huge advertising campaign and apparently, we won’t have to wait long to see it.
Games.com cites a source close to the campaign that says we can expect to see Farmville, YoVille and Mafia Wars-themed Super Big Gulps and Slurpees. The drinks and assorted snacks will come with game coupons which users can redeem for in-game items. Sandwiches will get you a sandwich cart in Farmville; fruit will you get a chocolate persimmon tree and so on and so forth.
Facebook Beats Google as US Most-Visited Website
Facebook has become the most-visited site in the US after beating former titleholder Google.
The popular social networking page toppled the search giant after accounting for 7.07 per cent of all US web traffic compared to Google’s 7.03 per cent, web analysts Hitwise revealed.
“It’s definitely a big moment for Facebook, even though they beat by a small margin,” News.com.au quoted Hitwise’s Matt Tatham as telling CNN.
He added: “People want information from friends they trust, versus the anonymity of a search engine.”
The research did not include other Google services such as Gmail and YouTube.
Facebook Ties up With PayPal to Collect Ad Revenue
Facebook and PayPal Thursday announced a tie-up to use PayPal as the way to pay for Facebook’s advertising and developer systems.
Facebook has currently over 400 million users worldwide, including 120 million in the US alone. Owned by eBay, PayPal is the online mode to pay for e-commerce transactions worldwide. It has 81 million accounts in 24 currencies around the world.
Under the tie-up, advertisers around the world will be able to use PayPal to pay for Facebook advertisements, PayPal said in a press release.
For businesses in areas where the payment process can be difficult and expensive, PayPal said its services will make it easier for advertisers to run campaigns on Facebook.
PayPal can also be used for the newly started Facebook Credits which aims to give (Facebook) users a fast and easy way
to buy virtual goods on Facebook, including items from the Facebook Gift Shop, the statement said.
“We want to give the people who use Facebook, as well as advertisers and developers, a fast and trusted way to pay across our service,” the statement quoted Dan Levy, director of payment operations at Facebook.
“As our business has grown, offering local methods of payment has become increasingly important for advertisers who
want to buy Facebook Ads. Teaming with PayPal, a global leader in online payments, makes this possible,” he said.
Osama Bedier, PayPal vice president (emerging technologies), added, “Put simply, PayPal’s business is payments. We make
it easier for customers to send and receive money online in 24 currencies and 190 markets around the world.
Facebook Launches Permissions for Apps and Websites
Facebook is rolling out a new feature that requires outside applications and websites to tell users exactly what parts of their profiles have to be shared for the apps to work.
Applications already had to ask users for permission to access anything in their profiles that wasn’t public. But these services didn’t have to specify what information they were using. Such information can include your photos, your friends’ birthdays or your e-mail address.
Under the new policy, the services will say which aspects of a profile they will mine, but the user still won’t be able to pick out which pieces they want to grant access to. They have to either grant permission or disallow the app from working at all.
The world’s largest online social network announced the change in April. It’s part of Facebook’s cooperation with Canada’ privacy commissioner, who has been among the sharpest critics of the company’s privacy policies.
Facebook has come under fire for the way it treats the information its nearly 500 million users post on the site. Most recently, privacy advocates and lawmakers have complained about Facebook’s “instant personalization” feature, which draws information from users’ profiles to customize a handful of other sites, including review site Yelp and the music service Pandora.
Partly because of criticism and partly because of the site’s growth from a small network for college students, Facebook’s privacy settings became complicated and often confusing over the years.
In response, Facebook simplified its privacy settings in changes unveiled last month — though some critics still say these changes don’t go far enough.