UPDATE on Wednesday, July 8: We have begun testing the new privacy settings with a small percentage of users. Each user within the test group will see several Transition Tools that will help them select the level of privacy they are most comfortable with and introduce the new, simpler settings. Additionally, we'll be showing some of you in the test a survey about the transition experience, so please tell us what you think.


The power to share is the cornerstone of Facebook. Privacy and the tools for tailoring what information is shared with whom are at the heart of trust. Over the past five years, Facebook has learned that effective privacy is grounded in three basic principles:

• Control. When people can easily control the audience for their information and content, they share more and they're able to better connect with the people who matter in their lives.
• Simplicity. When tools are simple, people are more likely to use them and understand them.
• Connection. With effective tools, people can successfully balance their desire to control access to information with their desire to connect – to discover and be discovered by those they care about.

That's why in the coming days, we'll be improving privacy on Facebook by launching a series of tests that guide people to new, simpler tools of control and connection.

Control

We're committed to giving people even greater control over the information they share and the audiences with whom they share it. At one extreme, we believe people should have the tools to "broadcast" information across the web and make it available to everyone. For example, back in March, we added an "Everyone" option to give people more control and enable them to share more broadly if they want, something that wasn't possible on Facebook before.

At the other extreme, we want to give people the power to limit who should receive any particular piece of information they want to share. The Publisher Privacy Control, which we launched in a beta last week, allows you to decide who can see the content you publish on a per-post basis. For example, you may want to make some posts available to everyone, while restricting others to your friends and family. You should be able to make that decision every time you share something on Facebook, and soon you'll be able to do this.

Just a few weeks ago, we started the process of phasing out regional networks, since they did not adequately reflect a world where people choose exactly the audience with whom they wish to share. Regional networks made sense for those who wanted to be more open when Facebook was small, but they lost their utility as the site became global.

Now, if you want to share with a smaller, more targeted group, you have a number of options, including specific Friend Lists, all of your friends, your friends and people in your school or work networks, and friends of friends. To share with more people and contribute to the general conversation going on in the world, you can select "Everyone."

Simplicity

When we add new features to Facebook, we usually include a corresponding privacy setting. While this has helped give some people more individualized controls over particular features, the compounding effect of more and more settings has made controlling privacy on Facebook too complicated.

With the test we're announcing today, we'll move towards simplifying these settings and putting them all on the same page. We'll also standardize the options we provide for each setting so the choices are always the same. Lastly, we'll remove overlapping settings to reduce confusion and combine profile fields that are similar, so you only have to make one decision.