Facebook
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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Facebook is making it easier for users to control who sees their information, and to have more say over the photographs they appear in, as the worlds No. 1 social networking service seeks to assuage privacy concerns.
The changes will enable Facebooks 750 million users to quickly access and modify their privacy settings each time they share information on the online network, rather than forcing them to click through various specialized sections of the website.
When a person uploads a photograph to Facebook and “tags,” or labels, their friends in the picture, the friends will now have the power to approve the tag before the picture is linked to their personal profiles. Previously, users could only un-tag themselves from undesirable photos after the fact.
Privacy has been an ongoing challenge for advertising-supported Facebook, which must balance its commercial interests in having people share more of their lives on the service with users sensitivities about having sufficient control over their personal information.
Last year, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg rolled out simplified privacy settings — which at one time required users to tinker with more than 150 different options — amid complaints by some users and privacy advocates.
Facebook also recently raised privacy hackles when it expanded the use of a facial recognition technology that automatically identifies people in photographs.
The latest changes come as Facebook is facing its most significant competition in the social networking market in years, following the recent launch of Google Incs rival service, Google+.
The new service, which enrolled 10 million users in its first two weeks, has touted its ability to let people organize their friends and contacts into different groups, thus offering fine-tuned privacy controls as a key advantage over Facebook.