Facebook membership hits 350 million; revamps privacy settings

by Jennifer Whitehead, brandrepublic.com    3-Dec-09, 09:58

GLOBAL - Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced that the social network now has 350 million users worldwide.

Zuckerberg released the figure as he introduced new privacy settings. Facebook is changing the options users have for their settings in order to let them control individually what content their friends and other Facebook members can see, dropping the setting for sharing content with users in their regional network. It means that in the next couple of weeks, Facebook users will be asked to review and update privacy settings.

In a blog post addressed to members, Zuckerberg said that with some regional networks now having millions of members, a privacy setting based on which region a user is based in was largely meaningless.

Asia-Pacific has seen some of the fastest growth for Facebook in 2010. In particular, Facebook has dislodged Friendster as the leading social network in several Southeast Asian markets.

The introduction of individual privacy levels was in response to requests from members.

Zuckerberg said: "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."

Privacy has always been a bone of contention between some Facebook members and the company. In 2007 Facebook ran into trouble over plans to introduce a system called Beacon that would share user data with advertisers.

The aim was to deliver ads that were tailored to individual users, but members complained that their privacy was being compromised by the software.

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