MINNEAPOLIS - After all these years, the social network has decided to listen to its network. Facebook is going to make a few changes.
On Thursday, Facebook will launch a few new privacy settings that, for some time, its users have said they wanted. Most notable is that tagging photos will be a little more difficult.
Now a person can't tag you, by name in a photo. They can still upload of photo of you and post it but can't tag your name.
Social media experts Nancy Lyons and Meghan Wilker say that feature has been a long time coming.
"Probably every person who is on Facebook has had the experience of somebody loading a photo of them and tagging it and having it be a photo they didn't want other people to see," Wilker said from her office at Clockwork Media Systems on Wednesday.
Privacy controls will now also be front and center, and easier to use as before they were a bit cumbersome to apply, let alone find on the page. Something Lyons says may have been by design as a social network doesn't have a vested interest in your privacy, rather, its business, is your public data.
"They are not in the business of encouraging us to be private so I have to believe that they obvious features are really a part of a bigger plan," Lyons said.
And what that might be, with these new features, is to take a direct hit at Facebook's newest competitor, Google+.
"I think Facebook had to make this change because people have been so vocal about privacy issues for the past year and Google plus makes this more real for them because it shows a competitor can build a social network that people are interested in," Wilker said.
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