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Facebook: Privacy Power to the User!

By Jason Middleton

| Tuesday, Aug 23, 2011 | Updated 11:40 AM PDT

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AllFacebook.com

Who gets to see what, and when -- that's what Facebook unveiled today. It's all about making those pesky, oft-complained-about privacy settings easier for users to adjust and monitor.

Again: Facebook has not changed or accessed your privacy settings. They've made it easier for you to control them.

It also helps separate the platform from that social start-up, Google+.

Some other improvements, according to allfacebook.com, include:

Users are gaining the ability to approve tags of themselves in others’ posts and photos.
All tags will include an attribution of the person who did the tagging.
Places no longer require physical check-ins, so people can add locations to posts, even from the desktop.
You don’t need to be friends with someone to tag them in a post or photo.
You don’t have to like a brand to tag it in a post or photo.
Facebook has changed the word “everyone” to “public” in privacy settings, for clarity.
You can customize privacy, or visibility of information, on a post-by-post basis.
Users can edit the visibility of individual bits of content anytime after they post.

A guide to the whole unveiling is here. It'll help users understand just how shares are distributed.

The photo tagging approval is intriguing, because it can help users avoid what inevitably winds up being a potentially embarrassing post by a no-doubt well-intentioned 'friend.'