Facebook Privacy Issues: The Giant Social Media Site Removes Privacy Rules For Teenagers

Facebook privacy issues again, the social media site has yet again changed its privacy rules. The move started on Wednesday, where users of the social media site aging from 13 to 17 have the option to set their privacy to "Public," revealing everything they post to the world.

An option restricted to teenagers before. They were restricted to sharing their post to "friends" or "friends of friends" only. Not anymore, according to a press release made by Facebook, "Teens are among the savviest people using social media, and whether it comes to civic engagement, activism, or their thoughts on a new movie, they want to be heard." "While only a small fraction of teens using Facebook might choose to post publicly, this update now gives them the choice to share more broadly, just like on other social media services," they added.

In addition, teenagers can now enable the "follow" feature, which allows their public posts to show up in other people's timelines.

In a statement made from Facebook's press release, these changes are made to keep them competitive in the social media market these include not only traditional websites, but also mobile competitors offering applications such as, WhatsApp and Blackberry Messenger.

The move has raised issues from the public, specially adults and parents.  They will surely be aghast at the thought of unknown people stalking their children online.

However, Mark Zuckerberg  made additional improvements to teens' privacy. For one thing, underage Facebook users will be shown additional confirmation dialog boxes when they try to post things publicly, so they won't broadcast anything by mistake.

The company, with approximately 1.2 billion users worldwide, is locked in a battle with Twitter and Google to attract end user advertisers like food, gadgets and clothing companies.