In keeping with Facebook’s two-steps-forward-one-step back policy, pioneered during the Beacon and friends list debacles, the company announced it would introduce a simplified set of privacy settings soon.
“Now we’ve heard from our users that we have gotten a little bit complex, I think we are going to work on that,” said Tim Sparapani, head of public policy for the company. “We are going to be providing options for users who want simplistic bands of privacy that they can choose from and I think we will see that in the next couple of weeks.”
The privacy settings, which could be called publicity settings in the wake of the company’s decisions to open up the site after the f8 conference, have been criticized as being, among other things, Byzantine. Perhaps this adjustment will provide a set of less confusing options.
This still leaves new users as entering Facebook with defaults on public, sharing all of their information with the Web at large. It seems unlikely to reverse the judgment of certain segment of the user base that the forced openness is good for Facebook, but not for the user community.
Sparapani made the announcement in an interview with American University radio. The portion in question starts at just over 26 minutes in. Below is a portion of the interview.
