Los Angeles — Facebook’s mobile presence has long been an essential part of the site, and if you use Facebook on your smartphone, you now have one less reason to visit the site on a regular browser, as the social networking giant is taking privacy issues more seriously and making these same controls available on mobile phones, so users can update and manage the info they share from wherever they are at.
Facebook now caters to more than 200 million users between its various mobile websites and smartphone applications. And due to excessive content gets posted from phones, Facebook has seen fit to port over its extensive privacy controls to mobile. The company just unveiled dashboard controls for mobile, which lets you tweak how apps interact with your profile right from your phone.
“Over 200 million people use Facebook on their mobile phones to share photos, access applications and stay connected with friends,” the company said in a blog post. In October, we added a dashboard to give you a way to clearly see and control the ways applications use your information. Today, we are making these same controls available on your mobile phone.”
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In today’s wireless environment, mobile use is becoming an increasingly important part of the Facebook equation–for instance, social game developer Zynga, which distributes its games largely through Facebook, recently announced that 10 million people per month are accessing its games on mobile phones.
“In a mobile environment, it is especially important for user controls to be simple and easy to use, and we have applied a lot of knowledge from the web to what we offer on devices,” a representative for Facebook said in a statement.
The new controls being announced today have to do with the applications that you have connected to Facebook. It also extends to third-party applications you use Facebook Connect for, and the ones you have installed on Facebook proper, there is a good chance that you are sharing your data with a lot of different sites, and some of which you may have forgotten about.
With the new controls, you can easily get into fine details and view how many you are using, see what information they are accessing, and then control what information you want them to have and how they can use it–for example, if they can post an update to all your friends every time you finish a game. You can also remove apps that you no longer want.
“It is very important for you to always have control over the information you want to share,” says Facebook mobile product manager Rose Yao. “And as more and more people use their phones to connect and share information, we will continue to innovate and improve your mobile privacy controls so you can enjoy Facebook wherever you go.”
This may not seem like a major issue, but remember that web-connected smartphones are rapidly ballooning in popularity and will outnumber PCs in the next few years. And through efforts like Facebook Zero, Facebook is drawing users who may not even own computers.
The update will be rolling out to users over the next few weeks. Users can also adjust settings for things like basic profile information, photos, videos, friends’ info, etc. This can all be found at m.facebook.com/privacy.