Safe Internet Alliance

Earlier this year, Facebook announced that it would begin to roll out a major tool transition that would result in better privacy controls for its users, and true to form, founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote an open letter last week going into detail as to what this roll-out would entail.

For those who don't remember, Facebook used to only be open to college students who were enrolled in a university and had a college email address; they were essentially given default access to anyone else's profiles within their university. Once Facebook opened the floodgates to everyone, the attempts to create similar networks based on region resulted in sometimes millions of people gaining access to your profile.

"The plan we've come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone," Zuckerberg wrote. "We're adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload."

Today, Mashable reports that those new changes have come into effect: "Today, the company plans to start asking all 350 million of its users to review and update their settings as they roll out the new simplified privacy interface."

But Mashable casts a skeptical view of the changes, noting that it will give everyone the chance to make their profiles completely public, so that the social network can compete better with Twitter as a microblogging platform.

These privacy changes come as a new report for Verizon was released detailing how data breaches are becoming increasingly more sophisticated, with criminals using multiple methods of accessing credit card and other personal identity information.

A U.S. restaurant chain was using a point-of-sale system that stored unencrypted card data, in violation of the payment card industry security guidelines. The thieves were able to get into the restaurant chain’s system because a third-party company hired to install the POS system in each restaurant neglected to change the system’s default password. Intruders had been in the system for “years” siphoning card data, Verizon reported.

We've already reported on how thieves are able to use information freely available on social networks and other websites to create a detailed profile of an individual that they can use in their criminal activity. By improving privacy settings in a way that users can understand, it will empower them to take action in filtering out those who may wish to do them harm