Facebook introduced some changes to its privacy policy today in advance of new features which will be rolling out soon, perhaps during its f8 developer conference next month. Some of the changes foreshadow new features dealing with location, taking advantage of the expanded “Everyone” settings, syncing contacts on your mobile phone with your Facebook contacts, and sharing your personal data with select Facebook Connect partners.
The most significant change seems like it could allow third-party sites to automatically sign you into Facebook Connect just based on your browser cookies. Another change sets up new location features. Facebook previously added some location language to its privacy policy back in October, but it’s now tweaked it again. It looks like not only will it be possible to associate a specific location with status updates, photo uploads, and other posts, but Facebook will also make it possible to add a geo-component Facebook pages, such as one for a store or a restaurant. So a link to a fan page for a store could also carry with it where it is located.
The other changes make it clearer what it means when you share your status updates and posts with “everyone” and who can find that information. It also makes a distinction between your ability to control who can access information on your personal page versus stuff you share on public pages.
There is also a change which talks about syncing your Facebook contacts with those on your mobile phone, another indication of how serious Facebook is about its mobile efforts.
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...
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