It has been a great year for making the world more open and
connected. Thanks to your help, more than 350 million people around the
world are using Facebook to share their lives online.







To make this possible, we have focused on giving you the tools you need
to share and control your information. Starting with the very first
version of Facebook five years ago, we've built tools that help you
control what you share with which individuals and groups of people. Our
work to improve privacy continues today.







Facebook's current privacy model revolves around "networks" —
communities for your school, your company or your region. This worked
well when Facebook was mostly used by students, since it made sense
that a student might want to share content with their fellow students.







Over time people also asked us to add networks for companies and
regions as well. Today we even have networks for some entire countries,
like India and China.







However, as Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now
have millions of members and we've concluded that this is no longer the
best way for you to control your privacy. Almost 50 percent of all
Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an
important issue for us. If we can build a better system, then more than
100 million people will have even more control of their information.







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.







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.
In addition, we'll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to
make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings. If
you want to read more about this, we began discussing this plan back in July.







Since this update will remove regional networks and create some new
settings, in the next couple of weeks we'll ask you to review and
update your privacy settings. You'll see a message that will explain
the changes and take you to a page where you can update your settings.
When you're finished, we'll show you a confirmation page so you can
make sure you chose the right settings for you. As always, once you're
done you'll still be able to change your settings whenever you want.







We've worked hard to build controls that we think will be better for
you, but we also understand that everyone's needs are different. We'll
suggest settings for you based on your current level of privacy, but
the best way for you to find the right settings is to read through all
your options and customize them for yourself. I encourage you to do
this and consider who you're sharing with online.







Thanks for being a part of making Facebook what it is today, and for helping to make the world more open and connected.




Mark Zuckerberg