BREAKING: Today Facebook held an event at their Facebook headquarters hosted by CEO Mark Zuckerberg to explain some of the changes being made to Facebook privacy settings as a result of all the criticism they received for their more recent changes. Zuckerberg began the event by saying

First, we've built one simple control to set who can see the content you post...Second we've reduced the amount of basic information that must be visible to everyone and we are removing the connections privacy model...Third, we've made it simple to control whether applications and Web sites can access any of your information.

In the new options, instead of having everyone go directly to custom settings, Facebook realizes some just want all of their information to either be public, available to friends of friends, or just friends. There will be options for those. Or you can choose a custom setting for each individual category if you decide to. This will all be available in the new Control Center.



You now also have control over who can see your connections with Fan Pages, previously defaulted to "Everyone". There's less information limited to just the "Everyone" setting. Now the only things that must be defaulted to Everyone is name, profile picture (if you have one), gender, and networks you join.

As far as the instant personalization feature goes, Facebook said it is making it easier for you to completely opt out of linking your information to third party sites for their usage. There's also a simple way to completely turn off applications on Facebook now and prevent developers from seeing your information. They now need to request specific approval for information that a user does not have set to "Everyone".

These changes will be rolled out in the next couple of weeks. Read Facebook's full blog post on the changes here or see a tutorial here. Do you think Facebook has made significant privacy improvements?