Thank you for all of your feedback so far on the new privacy tools we began rolling out today. We'll be providing updates and listing the most common questions we're receiving in this post. Be sure to read our full blog post on the new privacy tools, if you haven't already.

Why don't I have the new settings?

If you haven't yet seen the three-step transition tool for reviewing and updating your privacy settings, you will shortly. We're asking all 350 million people who use Facebook to go through this process and are rolling out the changes incrementally to make sure it goes smoothly. Keep in mind that you also won't see the new Privacy Settings page until you've gone through the transition process.

Can I limit access to my Friend List?

Many of you have mentioned that you want a way to hide your list of friends. In response to your feedback, we've removed the "View Friends" link from search results, making your Friend List less visible on the site.

Over the past year, Facebook Connect has brought an end to lengthy registration processes on many websites, provided a new way to interact with your News Feed on sites like Yahoo!, MSN and iGoogle, and empowered you to take your Facebook identity and friends to technologies such as Nintendo DSi, Xbox and iPhone apps.

Today, we are celebrating the first anniversary of Facebook Connect from the LeWeb conference in France. Facebook Connect is now available on more than 80,000 websites, and more than 60 million people are using the service to connect with their friends everywhere.

Today, we're launching new tools to give you even greater control over the information you share. Mark Zuckerberg, our founder and CEO, talked about these changes in his post last week. They include a simpler privacy settings page and a tool to control the audience for each and every post you create. We're also taking this opportunity to require all 350 million people who use Facebook to review and update their settings.

Developing privacy controls that work for 350 million people who all use the site in unique ways is a difficult challenge. We've put a lot of work into today's new features, using your suggestions to guide us, and we're proud of what we've accomplished. However, we're by no means done, and we look forward to your feedback, which will help us develop the next innovation in user control.

Here's a rundown of what to expect for now:

Helping You Choose Settings

Starting very soon, when you log in to Facebook, you'll be presented with a quick and easy three-step process for reviewing and updating your settings.

The first step explains the changes we're making. If you want a more in-depth explanation of how privacy works on Facebook, you can visit our new Privacy Center, a comprehensive privacy guide with information on how to control your experience. Once you're ready to continue, click "Continue to Next Step."

On the next page, you'll be asked to make choices about who can see the various parts of your profile and the posts you create. If you've ever chosen to restrict access to parts of your profile, we'll be recommending that you keep those more restrictive settings. If you've never done this, we'll be making recommendations based on how lots of people are sharing information today.

For example, we'll be recommending that you make available to everyone a limited set of information that helps people find and connect with you, information like "About Me" and where you work or go to school. For more sensitive information, like photos and videos in which you've been tagged and your phone number, we'll be recommending a more restrictive setting.

Once you've made choices based on your comfort level, click "Save Settings." You'll see a confirmation step that lists the settings you've selected and includes a link to the Privacy Settings page, where you can customize further. As always, you have control over your information and can revisit your settings at any time.

Watch the following tutorial to learn more about how to update your settings:



Simpler Settings

Facebook has always provided extensive and granular settings that allow you to control access to your information as you see fit. Over time, however, as the site has evolved and new features have been added, these settings have become increasingly complicated. That's why today we're launching a new, simpler Privacy Settings page.

After completing the transition tool, you'll be able to access this new page any time and the same way you access your privacy settings today—from the "Settings" link at the top right of every Facebook page. The new Privacy Settings page will include sections for profile information, contact information, applications and websites, and search. As always, you can block specific users, which prevents them from seeing any of your information or contacting you on Facebook.

No matter what section you choose, you'll see an identical setting selector with three basic levels of privacy: Friends, Friends of Friends and Everyone. If you're in a verified network, such as a network for your school or workplace, you'll continue to have a "Friends and Networks" option. You'll also be able to customize your settings based on certain friends and friend lists. As an added layer of protection, we'll be requiring that you first enter your Facebook username and password before changing any settings.

Adding Control for Each Post

We're introducing a completely new privacy tool for the Publisher, the box at the top of the profile where you post content like status updates, links, photos and videos. Once you've completed the transition tool, you'll be able to choose an audience for each piece of content you post at the time that you post it. Just look for the standard privacy lock icon at the bottom right of the Publisher. When you click it, you'll see our standard setting selector with the same basic levels of privacy. The first time you post with this new control, you'll get a message that explains how to use the control.

A Few Important Points

As we stated back in July, these new tools in no way alter our policies or practices around advertising. Facebook never shares personal information with advertisers except under your direction and control.

In addition, settings for minors will continue to be more restrictive than those for adults. If you're a minor and you share a piece of content with "Everyone," you will be sharing it at most with friends of friends and members of any school or work networks you've joined. Similarly, minors are opted out of sharing information with public search engines for indexing.

With these changes, a limited set of basic information that helps your friends find you will be made publicly available. This information is name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, friend list, and Pages. The overwhelming majority of people who use Facebook already make most or all of this information available to everyone. We've found that most people who do limit access just want to avoid being found in searches or prevent contact from strangers. For this reason, we'll be preserving the settings that allow you to exclude yourself from search results on Facebook and public search engines. You'll also be able to limit who can send you messages and friend requests to only friends and friends of friends.

We're happy to be offering you simpler tools to control your experience on Facebook. We encourage you to take the time to explore them and consider what settings are right for you.


Ruchi Sanghvi, Facebook's product manager for privacy, is in control.

Improving safety online is a group effort. It requires diligence from everyone who's online or on Facebook—whether by reporting abusive behavior or making sure your account and passwords are secure. At Facebook, we think about our role the same way. We must work with a diverse set of experts and organizations devoted to online safety in order to bring you the best safety resources on Facebook.

We've been following this collaborative approach to safety for years, and today we took another step by launching a global Safety Advisory Board. This group of five leading Internet safety organizations from North America and Europe will consult with us on online safety issues. One of our first projects together will be to overhaul the safety information that's available to you from the Facebook Help Center so that the resources are more comprehensive and include content that's specifically tailored to the needs of parents, teachers and teens.

We're grateful for the support of such a well-respected group of organizations in our latest effort. The initial members of the Safety Advisory Board are Childnet International, The Family Online Safety Institute, Common Sense Media, ConnectSafely and WiredSafety. Over time, we will consider adding additional members to the Safety Advisory Board as we identify good candidates and seek to broaden its international representation.

You can learn more about these organizations and our Safety Advisory Board by reading today's announcement here.

The Safety Advisory Board is just one step we've taken—and will continue to take—to promote a safer environment on Facebook. Just last week, we partnered with MTV on the A Thin Line campaign to educate people about digital abuse. A few weeks ago, the New York Attorney General's office cited Facebook's help in identifying and disabling the accounts of registered sex offenders. We worked with the BBC in November on their Bullyproof campaign in the UK. We also regularly invite organizations like the National Crime Prevention Council to share safety tips with you on this blog, and we provide updates on new safety approaches we're taking on the site to make reporting abuse easier.

As we now work with the Safety Advisory Board, you can expect to see more safety resources on this blog and in our Help Center in the months to come. Only by working together can all of us stay safe online.


Richard, Facebook's director of European public policy, is doing his part for online safety.

The following is part of our series on different ways Facebook is used across the world. Read the previous blog post in this series here. If you have a story you'd like to share with us, please submit it here.


Marie* was expecting a typical day when she arrived at her advertising job one January day earlier this year. By the end, she was among the 15 percent of her company who had been laid off as part of a downsizing at the New York company. She was so devastated that she didn't have time to say goodbye to co-workers with whom she had shared so many memories.

Like millions of people, Marie faced the harsh reality of the current economic recession that has led to double-digit unemployment in the United States and many other countries. She looked to support from her friends, family and former co-workers — and she found it by logging onto Facebook.

Facebook allowed her to reconnect with many of her former colleagues who had similarly lost their jobs, and they were able to support each other through a difficult time. Marie expected her first day without a job to be filled with sadness and isolation. Instead, she said she was greeted with well wishes and even job leads from previous co-workers and others who had been in similar situations.

"This gave me a great sense of support and connection," Marie said, "As I gladly received wonderful messages and followed up on leads, I realized that this would not be possible without Facebook."

One of those leads was for a marketing position, and Marie diligently followed up. Months later, on another day she thought would be typical, she received a job offer. Now she's working full-time and grateful for the support and advice of her friends. As Marie said, "Facebook really helped me stay connected, receive kind words, and indirectly secure employment."


Nikki, a specialist on Facebook's user operations team, is grateful to have found her job through Facebook, too.

*Marie is a pseudonym we used at the request of the Facebook user to protect her identity.

Casi Lumbra, 17, is an advisory board member for MTV's A Thin Line campaign, which launched today to help teens stop the spread of digital abuse. She's also a member of WiredSafety.org's Teenangels, a group of teens trained in all aspects of online safety, privacy and security. While people on Facebook may never encounter digital abuse, they still need to be able to spot it and stop it. We asked Casi to share her perspective as a teenager and expert about the causes of digital abuse and ways that teens can avoid it.


Have you ever snooped on a friend's text messages, posted nasty messages about a classmate or colleague on Facebook or posted an embarrassing picture of someone to get even? Have any of these things ever happened to you?

Let's face it: For many teens the answer to at least one of those questions is likely "yes." We use technology 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from connected devices in our backpacks, pockets and purses. This creates a digital side to every part of our lives. Even our relationships are wired. We interact with friends, boyfriends, girlfriends and acquaintances online just as we do offline, and sometimes it's hard to remember that our online behavior has boundaries.

If you also answered "yes" to any of the questions I asked above, you've experienced "digital abuse." Digital abuse is the use of digital technologies—such as cell phones, social networks, instant messaging and e-mail—to hurt someone, even when you didn't "mean" it. It even includes certain high-risk digital activities that can hurt us, like "sexting"—the act of sending sexually explicit images. It's also digital abuse if you:

• Harass people with constant text messages
• Demand that they be available at all times and even sleep with their cell phones
• Send nasty or threatening messages, post mean pictures or create groups to gang up on someone online
• Hack into people's accounts to hurt them
• Spy on people with keystroke loggers or take over their profiles by changing their passwords

Even though it involves the virtual world, digital abuse has serious real-world consequences. Things may start out as a joke, but end up badly. Curiosity can become criminal privacy intrusions. Sometimes it's hard to tell where our actions fall.

There's a thin line between what's harmless and what's harmful, and that line can be difficult to spot.

It has been a great year for making the world more open and connected. Thanks to your help, more than 350 million people around the world are using Facebook to share their lives online.

To make this possible, we have focused on giving you the tools you need to share and control your information. Starting with the very first version of Facebook five years ago, we've built tools that help you control what you share with which individuals and groups of people. Our work to improve privacy continues today.

Facebook's current privacy model revolves around "networks" — communities 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.

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. If you want to read more about this, we began discussing this plan back in July.

Since this update will remove regional networks and create some new settings, in the next couple of weeks we'll ask you to review and update your privacy settings. You'll see a message that will explain the changes and take you to a page where you can update your settings. When you're finished, we'll show you a confirmation page so you can make sure you chose the right settings for you. As always, once you're done you'll still be able to change your settings whenever you want.

We've worked hard to build controls that we think will be better for you, but we also understand that everyone's needs are different. We'll suggest settings for you based on your current level of privacy, but the best way for you to find the right settings is to read through all your options and customize them for yourself. I encourage you to do this and consider who you're sharing with online.

Thanks for being a part of making Facebook what it is today, and for helping to make the world more open and connected.


Mark Zuckerberg

Susan Smith Ellis is the CEO of (RED), a brand that helps raise awareness and money for the fight against AIDS in Africa. The organization works with some of the world's largest brands like American Express, Apple, Starbucks and Nike to produce (RED)-branded products, where a portion of the profits go directly to the Global Fund to invest in AIDS programs in Africa. In honor of today being World AIDS Day, we've asked Susan to share her thoughts on how the growth of social media has helped spread (RED)'s message in the fight against AIDS.


In 2006, two events occurred, which at first glance couldn't have been more unrelated. Frustrated by a lack of engagement from business in the fight against AIDS in Africa and trying to push companies to contribute more to the Global Fund to help fight HIV/AIDS—one of the most devastating yet preventable and treatable diseases in Africa—(RED)'s founders launched a new model of creative capitalism. It was a very new idea and a very different concept.

In September of the same year, Facebook expanded registration so anyone with an email address could join the site. The hope was that with more and more people sharing with each other online, the world would be more open and connected.

Both concepts have proven to be successful beyond what people could have ever imagined. And as far as (RED) is concerned, our success is very much owed to the emerging world of social media that exploded, just when we needed it. Like social media itself, with (RED) the power is not so much in the act of one individual but in the incredible power of the collective acts of individuals. In just over three years, over 1.5 million people have joined (RED) via a range of social media.

The following is part of our series on different ways you can use Facebook to connect with public figures and organizations around the world. Read the previous blog post in this series here.


I spend so much time surfing the Web everyday that it feels only natural that I shop online, too, especially with the holiday season approaching. With the increasing number of retail websites, email digests and discount codes, it's hard to keep track of my favorite designers and stores without feeling overwhelmed. Now that all of my favorite fashion brands and retailers are using Facebook to update their fans, I am able to find my trusted sources on everything from couture to casual-wear in one place.

To organize all this information, I created a Friend List of my favorite clothing-related Pages on Facebook. By selecting "Create New List" from the left-hand side of my home page, I was able to easily create a list of my favorite Pages. Whenever I'm in the mood for some retail therapy, I can select the "Shopping" list on my home page and see what's new in the world of fashion. Some of my favorite retailers, like local clothing boutique Pink & Harmony in Menlo Park, Calif., internet retailer Shopbop or internationally renowned designer Diane von Furstenberg frequently update their Pages with photos of their latest inventory and offer deals and exclusives to their Facebook fans.

The following is part of our series on different ways you can use Facebook to connect with public figures and organizations around the world. Read the previous blog post in this series here.


As Thanksgiving approaches in the U.S., I can't help it: Thanksgiving dinner is on my mind — turkey, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie. Yet even as I'm anticipating my favorite holiday foods, I'm reminded of how many people in the U.S. and around the world are unable to enjoy my favorite treats during the holidays, let alone any kind of meal on a daily basis. It seems shortsighted to think of them so often during the holiday season yet so rarely during the rest of the year.

Which is why I make an effort to volunteer for some of my favorite local causes, like the San Francisco Food Bank, Bay Area Girls on the Run and the East Bay AIDS Project year round. Now, it's easier than ever to keep up with these organizations through their updates on Facebook well beyond the traditional season of giving.

Giving Back

As a fan of the San Francisco Food Bank Facebook Page, I can easily keep track of all of their upcoming events. For instance, this past weekend, I RSVP'ed for their food drive, "Scouting for Food" led by the San Francisco Boy Scouts. Attendees are reminded to leave contributions on their doorstep the morning of the event for the Boy Scouts to collect. Each time a new event pops up in my News Feed, I'm provided with another opportunity and a reminder to donate my time.