1. New users accounts start with the default of sharing posts to “friends only”

2. Facebook now has a “friendly privacy dinosaur” that pops up for first-time posters, letting them know they have choices for who they want to share their post and that the default setting is to share with “friends only”

3. The privacy dinosaur also pops up for those who haven’t changed their share settings in a while to remind them of their options and alert them of what exactly “public” means when sharing.

Facebook’s original highly public privacy policy appears to have been geared toward stimulating online interaction.  The more people see, the logic goes, the more they share and the more they post.   It is no secret, moreover, that Facebook financially benefits from this massive data collection through more effective (and therefore more expensive) targeted advertisements.  This premise, however, seems to have been proven incorrect.  People simply don’t want public post private or semi-private thoughts and things.

The new “private” posting model banks on the notion that people who feel protected and private are more likely to share, and sharing within a small group is better than not sharing at all for Facebook’s data collection enterprises. The new tracking model leverages this increase in private sharing to create better, more personalized advertisements for users – and of course more money for Facebook.

SECOND,  Facebook also announced the creation of a far more sophisticated tracking system that will track user’s application and browsing history on all websites in order to create better targeted advertisements.   This system opts users in by default.