Privacy improvements at Facebook

As it announced that it now has more than 350 million members, leading social network Facebook also told users it was improving its privacy standards.Regional networks are to be scrapped, and users will now be able to decide who views each specific piece of content they post.Facebook's networks are communities that can be created for your school, your company or your region. “This worked well when Facebook was mostly used by students, since it made sense that a student might want to share content with their fellow students,” said Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in an open letter to members. “Over time people also asked us to add networks for companies and regions as well. Today we even have networks for some entire countries, like India and China.“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. Almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us. If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information.“The plan we've come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.“We're adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In addition, we'll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings.”Facebook users will be asked to review and update their privacy settings in the next couple of weeks, to accommodate the changes.