It was announced this week that lessons in internet safety will be taught in schools from 2011.

Facebook has an age limit of 13 – but with much younger users flouting the rules and cases of teenagers posting their mobile phone numbers online, there have long been calls to make the site’s security measures more robust.

And Facebook itself seems to have woken up to the fact that to reduce bad press for its security measures, it must review those often complicated settings. Which is probably what prompted the recent open letter to members from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

In it, he acknowledges that when Facebook was first developed, it was used primarily by students who wanted to share content with other students in their online university network.

Facebook then grew and began to include networks for companies, regions and even full countries, with users perhaps not realising that anyone in the same network (eg Wales) could see your profile, even if you were not ‘friends’. With almost 50% of Facebook users belonging to a network, the social networking site now acknowledges that “this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy.”

Zuckerberg goes on: “The plan we've come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.”
Even more exciting is the fact that you’ll now be able to control who will be able to see each piece of content you upload to the site, making it simple to control what goes into the public domain.

So, not everyone has to know about what you got up to at the office Christmas party, and your dignity - and perhaps your safety - could remain intact.

- Katie Chappelle, digital media manager