Facebook adds Today some major Privacy Control Features

Over the past few months, Facebook has attracted lot of negative attention over privacy issues. The launch of the rival social network Google+ further enhanced Facebook’s flaws. Facebook  seems to have taken all the criticism positively and has rolled out some new privacy control features on the site, the company announced on its blog yesterday.

Now, Facebook users have more control over the information they share with others and what other are sharing about them on the social networking platform.

Here are some of the new features that Facebook has launched:

Control over Profile Content

The Content on your profile, from your bio, your work information to your interests and photo albums, will have an icon and a drop-down menu on the right side. Using this inline menu you can control the visibility of each of these sections with just one click. Earlier you had to visit the settings page to change profile visibility and now these features are available right there on your profile page.

Tags Approval Feature

Earlier photos you were tagged in would show up on your profile as soon as you were tagged and you had no way to avoid that. Going forward, you can choose to approve or reject any photo or post you are tagged in before it’s visible to anyone else on your profile.

Similarly, anyone who could see your photos or posts could add tags to them, earlier. Going  ahead, you have the option to approve or reject any tag someone tries to add to your photos and posts.

View Profile Tool

The View profile tool that shows you how your profile appears to someone, was earlier available on the settings page. Now, this tool would appear on the top of your profile making its easier to access.

Visibility of Posts

Now you can control who can view your posts, by choosing the appropriate category from the drop-down menu right next to the post. This dropdown menu will be expanding over time to include smaller groups of people you may want to share with, like co-workers, Friend Lists you’ve created, and Groups you’re a member of(similar to Google+). These will make it easy to select the audience for any post.

Change the Post Visibility after posting

If you accidentally post something to the wrong group, or change your mind, you can adjust it with the inline control even after posting.

Removing Tags

There have been a lot of confusions regarding removal of tags. Now your options for removing tags or content on Facebook are presented more clearly. You have options like: removing from your profile, removing the tag itself, messaging the photo owner or tagger, and requesting the content get taken down.

Check out the Facebook blog post for more details on the new features being added.

What do you think about these changes that Facebook has rolled out? Do you think these features make Facebook better than Google Plus.