Facebook have been planning to change their privacy settings for a number of weeks now, this has been long overdue. All facebook users will have seen last week a letter from founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg that let everyone know about the plans for the changes, and now the day has finally come. The privacy settings are ready for the update!

Today, facebook plans to start asking all 350 million of its users to review and update their settings as they have now make a simple interface in which you can decide on your privacy settings. This has been done to make it easier for the users. (The old ones really were quite complex) it’s also all about encouraging them to share more stuff publicly by letting them choose an “everyone” option each time they post something. Using the everyone option is a key thing for facebook, alike twitter whos posts are entirely public they encourage people to use the everyone option to help the use of real-time search, where both are now integrated in Google. Although it has many times more users than Twitter, to date, most Facebook data remains private and, hence, inaccessible to search engines. We’ll see how that starts to change after today.