Social networking site rolls swathe of feature enhancements

Facebook has moved to address one of its biggest privacy challenges by finally giving users more control over photos tagged and shared on their profile.

Facebook users have been in any pictures of her friends, uploaded the largest photo sharing site on the net, which hosts an estimated 100 billion photos will be highlighted.

Recognition of one of the most common requests from users, belongs to a new swathe of feature enhancements that are wheeled through the website in the coming days, a new drop-down menu, users now demand to remove her boyfriend photo or even block that friend. Users will also be able to chose to approve or reject any photo they are tagged in before it goes live.

Two other changes in response to Twitter and Google 's rising social networking tool, Google + seen.

Facebook 's status updates is now an option to a site, linking with others in the post to mention - both functions will be familiar with Twitter users - and decided that the post office with friends or the general public split.

Contact in an allusion to the popularity of the "disc" in Google +, which allow users to group, family and friends and provide an adequate level of content sharing, Facebook has said the new sharing option is eventually extended, so that users can decide whether the individual contributions, links and photos to share with certain groups of friends.

"This drop-down menu will be over time expanded to allow smaller groups of people who want to release you, as colleague, friend, you list 'have created and groups that you' re a member of the "said Facebook 's vice president of product, Chris Cox, in a blog post. "This makes it easy to quickly select exactly the audience you need for every post."

These improvements mark a change in tactics for Facebook, the regular user has intensified with its rapid development, politics, rolling out new features without prior notice. Several of them have sparked concerns about the site \ the attitude of privacy, displayed, including the introduction of the now standard news feed in 2006, which users shared 'activities with friends and the Facebook Beacon feature, the user' business activities .

Cox said Facebook had "a better job done" is the consulting stakeholders and studying privacy privacy controls before the introduction of the feature. Six months in development, they also include moving a large part of the privacy and sharing settings on the pages and posts themselves, so they are more accessible.

New features also allow users to other users who are not friends-day, although they need to approve the photo before it goes live, and the replacement option for "Everyone 'has been renamed" public " .

"This won 't the last iteration of our privacy settings," said Cox. "We 're always trying to improve, always with usability testing and more on feeding in the controls, who look to improve content."

Cox pointed comparisons with Google and Twitter +. "People are always talking about Google, no matter what we do, and that 's good - \ We're not using Google to the work that we determine how to Twitter -. It' sa very different service and I 'm not sure, how they will react. We just want to be just about the differences between people sharing behaviors that \. "

The changes will also mean that the opt-in "Places" function on Facebook 's mobile application that share a controversy among the users of its site had caused concerns, will be abolished. Instead, users can choose to add their location to status updates they post.

"The situation is not \ about checking in," said Cox. "Places was more a monolithic function, but we 've flowing exchange of tool and turned it into a joint. \ Taken"