California, May 23 (IANS): Bowing to users' demands to change its default privacy setting, the popular social media site Facebook has announced that it would give a privacy checkup to its nearly 1.28 billion users worldwide.
Anyone joining Facebook now will only share posts with friends and family, unless they choose to make their information open to everyone online, according to a Facebook post.
Till date, the default setting led many users to accidentally share their posts with the entire world.
The decision to reduce the risk of new users over-sharing was taken in response to feedback from its subscribers, Mike Nowak, Facebook's privacy product manager was quoted as saying.
“We want people's first impressions of Facebook to be as awesome as possible, and we know it is worse to accidentally overshare than to accidentally undershare,” Nowak emphasised.
Most recently, Facebook is being sued by a group of parents on whether it can use their children's images in adverts without consent.
“While some people want to post to everyone, others have told us that they are more comfortable sharing with a smaller group, like just their friends,” Facebook post noted.
“We recognise that it is much worse for someone to accidentally share with everyone when they actually meant to share just with friends, compared with the reverse,” it added.