Careful Everyone Using Facebook: Your Data is About to Become Public

There is word today on the blogosphere that privacy on Facebook is about to make a huge turn towards openness.

The company announced today that it’s going to offer a more granular control over who sees posts that you publish on your newsfeed, which is great news for a lot of us (in my case and my wife’s we have bilingual followers, so this is a great addition).

Today, we’re launching a beta version of an improved Publisher—the main place to add content such as photos, videos, and status updates on your home page and profile. The new Publisher has been streamlined a bit, and its most significant improvement is the new Publisher Privacy Control that gives you the opportunity to answer the question, “Who do you want to tell?” as easily as you answer the question, “What’s on your mind?”

However, Marshal Kirkpatrick from ReadWriteWeb points out that by default all your status updates, photos and shares will be public unless you change your privacy settings by default.

This, of course, is one more move from Facebook to become an open social platform much like Twitter and FriendFeed are. However, one of the differentiating things about Facebook was their level of privacy control, so a lot of unsuspecting users will suddenly see questionable content being wide open.

Although the changes haven’t rolled out to everyone, be on the lookout. When you see the sharing option as the image depicted above, make sure to review your privacy settings so that you can share what you really want to share.

You can change the default setting of your Publisher Control from the Privacy page using the following steps:

• Select “Privacy Settings” from the Settings dropdown at the top of any Facebook page.
• Click “Profile.”
• Choose your setting from the Publisher Control Default drop-down menu.
• Select “Save Changes” at the bottom of the page.

Expect a Facebook user backlash to follow shortly.