US Government Forcing Facebook To Not Suck At Privacy

Remember that time Facebook changed its privacy settings and made literally everything about you public? Yeah, you weren’t the only person who raised several eyebrows at once — the US Federal Trade Commission dropped the hammer on Zuck. We all win.

The WSJ reports an agreement between the FTC and Facebook — pending final approval from the US government — would force you to opt in to sharing your stuff — you’d be completely locked off from the internet by default.

This is how Facebook should have worked from day one. It simply makes a hell of a lot more sense to choose who you do want to see your bathing suit pictures and angry status updates, than to exhaustively figure out who you don’t want peeping.

And if that’s not good enough for you, the government’s also asking for mandatory privacy audits of Facebook for the next two decades. That ought to keep the shocking this-is-so-bad-it-must-be-a-mistake Facebook privacy redesigns to a minimum. [WSJ via TNW]