By
Laurie Whitwell
Last updated at 8:12 PM on 10th September 2011
Facebook has unveiled a revolutionary privacy setting, which allows users to screen photos they are tagged in before the images appear on their profile.
The move will give people much greater control over what pictures they are linked to and has the potential to stop partners or employers finding incriminating or embarrassing shots online.
The new tagging feature significantly improves users’ ability to mould their Facebook personas, and eliminate those snaps of a drunken night out ever becoming visible.
Tags a lot: The new system will allow Facebook users to screen which pictures they are tagged in before they appear online
Previously, their only option was damage control: a tagged photo would appear instantly on a profile, and remain there until the user was able to get to a computer to de-tag it.
‘There’s one new feature that you really must turn on as soon as it becomes available to you: profile review,’ wrote Jason Sattler of F-Secure, an anti-virus and computer security software company, in a blog on AllFacebook.com.
‘This feature is important because it gives you control over your profile.
‘If a potential employer or an organization considering you for a scholarship is viewing your profile, you don’t want to give others the ability to post questionable images directly on your wall.’
The update also allows users to vet when they are mentioned by other people in their posts. And it has expanded its ‘de-tagging’ tool so users can request a photo be removed, report abusive posts and even block other users.
Tag this: Facebook’s privacy change comes as profits at Mark Zuckerberg’s company were revealed to be $1.6billion in the first half of 2011
The changes have been a long time coming, said Facebook in its announcement of the privacy upgrades.
‘One of the top requests we’ve heard is for the ability to approve these tags before they show up on your profile,’ the company wrote.
This new way of protecting your privacy is balanced against the more liberal features, which allow users to tag anyone in their posts, whether they are friends with that person or not.
Facebook says users will get alerts in advance if they have been tagged by a stranger, but there have been reports of this being erratic.
Another big switch rolled out by Facebook will allow people to see how their profiles are viewed by others, simply by typing in the name of that person.
For a walk-through guide of the privacy changes, go to: http://www.allfacebook.com/facebook-profile-review-2011-09
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Get rid of Facebook, don’t need to know when friends and family are going for a s**t.
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The only complaint I have is the setting applies to all tags i.e. status and posts you’re mentioned in as well as photos. Why didn’t they keep the two separate? Also, when tagged in a photo it posts to your profile automatically, unlike previous setting where you could set it so that only you could see tagged photos of yourself.
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Brilliant, no more waking up hanging and discovering all for friends have seen the embarrassing stuff you did the night before!
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Happy Star…You are talking nonsense.
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I’ve just been explaining to a teenager how anything she puts on facebook is likely to be around for ever. She’s 15 at the moment, and I suggested that it might be a good idea not to put anything on her page that she might not want her boss or her future husband to know when she is in her thirties. She’s very ambitious and I think she got the message, but she certainly hadn’t realised that once something had been posted, it could be around for ever.
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Happy star, the North, 10/9/2011 21:59 – No it hasn’t reset privacy settings. They are all the same as before, I just checked. Spreading lies helps nobody. I personally find facebook useful, although I can see that it is not appropriate for everyone.
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