Facebook Revamps Privacy Policy

There are those who say Facebook's privacy policy is harder to understand than Google's search algorithm. But Facebook says it hopes to change all that and says it is working to revamp its privacy policy to make it more easily understood.

In a blog entry on its website, Facebook's “site governance” team concedes that its existing privacy policy leaves something to be desire. “Our own privacy policy has been criticized as being '5830 words of legalese' and 'longer than the U.S. constitution – without the amendments,' the blog entry admitted.

Facebook's blog says most sites' privacy policy are “written for privacy advocates and regulators and not for the people that actually use the website.” So Facebook says it is working to frame a new privacy policy, based on three principles:

1. It should be easy to understand;

2. It should be “visual and interactive;'

3. It should “focus on the questions people who use Facebook are most likely to ask.”

Facebook says the new policy provides more detailed explanations about how users' information is used, how advertisers can target ads and what information Facebook may receive from social plug-ins.

The blog post links to a “first attempt” to write a more fathomable document. Using hyperlinks, the revised guide is basically an index to successively more detailed pages about such topics as “How advertising works” and “Minors and Safety.”

But whether the revised version, despite its simple (and even simplistic) language will satisfy the site's users remains to be seen. At mid-afternoon Friday, 223 Facebook users had posted comments, representing a wide range of opinions from delight to utter dismissiveness.

As usual in Web forums, many of the comments were slightly difficult to parse, including one from a Maxwell Monday, whose total contribution to the conversation was, “i like that pravcy.”