Facebook

Facebook

In a rare move, Facebook announced Thursday that it will ratchet down the amount of sharing users are defaulted into. Starting Thursday, status updates will no longer be shared to the public automatically; instead, they will be shared only to friends. Facebook has made any items shared through the site available to the public since 2011, with more private settings available in a drop-down menu. Now that the company is starting to pay more attention to privacy and is trying to deal with users’ News Feeds getting crushed under the weight of all the possible posts that can be fed to them, it seems to be recognizing the negatives of a default public share. As we pointed out around Facebook’s tenth anniversary, the ambiguity of sharing to a nebulous “public” tends to pressure people out of sharing.

Read the full story at Ars Technica.

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