Facebook announced today that users of its mobile site m.facebook.com will soon be able to edit their privacy settings, including who sees what they post and granular controls for all of their privacy settings. More than 150 million people are actively use Facebook on mobile devices, often posting status updates and photos. If a user wants to set their status to only be available to friends before making a particularly sensitive post, they’ll soon be able to do this from m.facebook.com. The blog makes no mention of when Facebook’s mobile apps, like Facebook for iPhone, will gain privacy controls.
The mobile site is only part of Facebook’s multi-pronged mobile strategy, which also includes mobile apps and 0.facebook.com, but the addition shows that the company is committed to letting users control their data across platforms. The feature is being rolled out slowly, so it is currently unclear if users will be able to set distribution on a post-by-post basis or only as an overarching setting.
Users will soon be able to access the new mobile privacy controls at m.facebook.com/privacy, or by navigating to Settings->Privacy Settings. There they’ll be able to select who can see the content they share by selecting one of the buckets (Friends Only, Friends of Friends, Everyone, Recommended or Custom) that came along with the new privacy interface released in late May. Recommended is the first option, however, this in fact means sharing posts with everyone, which we noted could be risky since users often post content which could be dangerous or damaging to their credibility if seen by the wrong people.
Users will also have granular privacy control of who sees any of the actions one can take on Facebook. Block lists, public search settings, and basic directory information privacy will also be editable from m.facebook.com.
While users could always use their mobile browsers to change privacy settings by navigating to the slow-loading full site, access from within the mobile interface will increase the likelihood that users take control of who sees their content.