Have you ever worried about accidentally sharing too much on Facebook? I don’t mean the concern that it might be inappropriate to share all the details of your hospital stay. Instead, I mean the fear that your post could be read by people you never intended to see it. Facebook is aware of these concerns.
A blog post on Facebook Newsroom gives details about a change to privacy settings that is being rolled out. Current users of Facebook will soon see a “Privacy Checkup” pop-up appear when they make a post.
“We just wanted to make sure you’re sharing with the right people”, it helpfully states. It offers a brief tutorial about each privacy setting, making it easier for users to select how private they want an individual post to be. There will be more “Privacy Checkup” pop-ups later on, if it has been a while since a user has changed who can see his or her posts.
As of May 22, 2014, when a new person joins Facebook, the default audience of their first post will be set to “Friends”. Previous to this change, new users of Facebook had their default audience set to “Public”.
In addition to that, new Facebook users will get an automatic “reminder” that appears when they make their first post. It points to the privacy setting button that is attached to each post and asks “Who would you like to see your post?” If the person chooses to ignore that popup, their post will automatically be set to “Friends”.
Overall, these changes could help prevent Facebook users from embarrassing themselves by posting something publicly that was intended to only be seen by their friends. This change is very similar to one that took effect in October of 2013 that changed the default privacy setting on the posts on Facebook accounts of teens (age 13 through 17). It went from having the default privacy setting be “Friends of Friends” to “Friends” only.