At the F8 developer conference in San Francisco earlier this week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg highlighted that his massively popular social networking website intends to grant its users even more security in the future.
With his new mantra, “Move fast with stable infra”, Zuckerberg aims to give Facebook users a bigger and brighter experience for their social networking needs. New features will be available in the near future, allowing users to gain more control in choosing which of their Facebook information to share with third party websites.
With social media apps as popular and as widely used as Facebook, there is always the threat of user privacy being invading. Because Facebook is completely free for everyone, it makes much use of advertising and marketing to generate income. This is largely one of the reasons why when you use Facebook, you are very likely to meet with third-party clients or websites.
Many of these websites are harmless. They just allow you convenient access without having to log in again and again. However, because of this same freedom in third-party website access, some are potentially invasive and might even leak personal information.
Control Info You Provide
The new Facebook Login flow is perfect for users who like to access the services of other websites and apps through their Facebook account. Right now, when we choose to “Login with Facebook”, we are merely shown a list of the things that the app can do, such as see our friend’s lists and post on walls for us. We then only have two options: to proceed, thus allowing the app to gain access to our particular user information, or cancel, thus preventing ourselves to avail of the app’s services.
With the new Facebook Login flow, however, we can finally edit the information we choose to provide for these apps. We can keep wall-posting obligations for ourselves, and share only information that we are confident with sharing. When we are OK with the boundaries set, we can finally head on to use our desired app.
Facebook lets its users get the best out of both worlds. Also, by encouraging users to choose to login to websites and apps using Facebook, Facebook lifts off the burden of having to remember so many usernames and passwords for our many website accounts, not to mention barrages of email notifications and newsletters.
Login Anonymously
For shy users who still wish to share nothing of themselves for third party apps, however, there will also be a new option: Login Anonymously. This is a good way for users to sort of test the waters first without risking anything, before deciding whether they wish to connect with an app through Facebook.
Audience Network
Zuckerberg introduced new features not just for users but advertisers as well. A new mobile ad network assures advertisers that their ads and promotions are able to reach the right audience. Facebook uses statistics of its users’ demographics, interests and behavioural data to create an accurate targeting method for advertisers to reach through their prospective customers. This ensures that they can gain a bigger number of patrons, letting them make the most out of the money they spend for posting ads.
It definitely seems like Facebook is heading towards the right direction. To think that the Big Blue App has been up and running for 10 years now and is still as popular as ever must mean that its developers are doing something right. This probably serves as a threatening challenge to Facebook’s other competitors to step up their gameplan and provide new and better services for their users.
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