Facebook tightens privacy as users hit 350 million

The founder of Facebook, a social networking site, has announced its decision to tighten privacy settings as its users hit 350 million on Wednesday.

In an open later sent to its users late Wednesday, Mark Zukerberg said he will be removing regional networks because it has outgrown the initial estimates.

“Today we even have networks for some entire countries, like India and China,” Mr. Zukerberg said.

“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.

“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,” Mr. Zukerberg added.

He said the new security innovations are based on popular requests from users and will include ability to control who sees the piece of content a user create or uploads.

“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,” he added.

Facebook is the most popular social networking site in several English-speaking countries, including Canada and the United Kingdom and Nigeria. Currently, there are at least 350,000 people registered and active on Facebook.

Facebook is not just a social site

Facebook has made itself an essential and an omnipresent part of the Internet, like Google attempted to do with its services, or Microsoft has done with regard to computers.

Nowadays, almost every kind of communication, both formal and informal,can be done on Facebook.

In December 2008, the Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory ruled that Facebook is a valid protocol to serve court notices to defendants and in March 2009, the New Zealand High Court associate justice, David Glendall, allowed for the serving of legal papers on Craig Axe by the company Axe Market Garden via Facebook.

Nigerians and Facebook

Facebook has also become a vital platform for political campaigns and protest as well. Many Nigerian politicians and political groups have fan pages on Facebook where they express their views without restriction, which would have been the case in the real world. Indeed, a group, Nigeria Liberty Forum, is currently inviting Nigerians to join a new page titled, “A National Call on President Umaru Yar’Adua to Step Down”.

Many have complained of its addictive features and in some office, the site is banned during work hours, however, as technology improves, many phones now support the mobile version of the Facebook application and patronage is on the rise.