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Facebook changes privacy settings

by on23 May 2014

New users see less

Social notworking site Facebook has changed a privacy setting on its social network which will stop everyone seeing new users' first posts. Critics said the status quo forced people to over-share personal information. The company said that the status updates that new users post will now be viewable only to friends by default, instead of being viewable to the general public as it had previously been.

Facebook users will continue to be able to customize their settings so that status updates can be seen by as big or small an audience as they want. The outfit said that sometimes people have felt that they've been unpleasantly surprised that their information was more public than they expected or intended, he said. 

In 2009, Facebook introduced a feature that allowed users to share posts beyond their circles of friends. When new users signed up for Facebook, their status updates were automatically broadcast to the public unless users manually altered the setting. Now Internet users appear interested in limiting who sees their online activities. Mobile messaging and social networking apps such as Snapchat and Whisper offer anonymity features that have become popular with many users. 

Facebook said on Thursday that it will now display a pop-up message informing new users of the option to publish the message more broadly if they wish.

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