For those always on the lookout for new ways to ramp up their privacy and security on the site, Facebook has just added two additional options for privacy control to their apps settings page – Instant Personalization and Public Search.
From there, users can learn about each feature as well as enable/disable them with one click.
The first new addition concerns instant personalization – or Facebook’s partnership with various outside websites that allows them to show visitors friend data. For instance, when you see that some of your Facebook friends have written reviews about attractions in a particular city on Trip Advisor.
“Just as your News Feed on Facebook is built uniquely for you, instant personalization sites let you easily bring your friends and interests with you,” says Facebook. “Partners adhere to Facebook’s guidelines and may only use your public information to serve you a personalized experience. Public information includes your name, profile picture, gender, networks, and other information you’ve made public.”
Sites that feature this include Bing, Pandora, Yelp, Rotten Tomatoes, Scribd and more.
Clicking “Edit Settings” for Instant Personalization allows you to disable this altogether – means you won’t see friend’s info on outside sites and they won’t see yours. Of course, if you want to simply limit what kind of information is accessible but not disable this altogether, you can do so in your privacy settings.
The other new addition is Public Search, which lets users see a preview of how their Timelines appear to people during a public search.
Public search controls whether people who enter your name in a search engine will see a preview of your Facebook timeline. Because some search engines cache information, some of your timeline information may be available for a period of time after you turn public search off.
Users can opt out of public search here.
[Via AllFacebook]
