Facebook just gave you a simpler way to control your privacy on the web

Facebook has just announced its new Shared Activity plug-in, a tool that lets you manage who sees what you’re doing on Facebook-connected apps.

Best of all, it’s a one-click process. You don’t have to navigate into the bowels of your Facebook profile to find it; in fact, the social network designed it so you can manage your privacy settings even when you’re not on Facebook.com.

Imagine you’re browsing around your favorite news site, ILoveBieber.com. You’ve previously logged into the site using your Facebook profile, because once you’re logged in, you get to play social games with Justin Bieber themes, and how fun is that? But you’re not sure you want everyone on your Facebook friends list to see your activity, so you check the site’s Shared Activity plug-in, which is already hovering in the bottom left corner of the screen, nice and obvious, and you click “No one” on the drop-down menu of groups to share with.

On Facebook’s developer blog, Facebooker Andrew Chen writes, “The Shared Activity plug-in lists a person’s activities published from your app to Facebook including Open Graph activities, Like button stories, and comment plugin activities.

“For example, when an individual uses a music app, she could modify the privacy settings, through the plug-in, for specific song listening activities, without needing to go back to Facebook to control what’s shown. Similarly, if a person, through a travel app, likes a restaurant or reviews a hotel, and decides that these activities should only be viewable to a select group on friends on Facebook, he can control this within the plugin as well.”

In the documentation, Facebook lets devs specify a size and typeface for the plug-in and then generates the code automatically.

The controls are extremely granular and easy to use. As the Open Graph grows, it’s good to see that Facebook is encouraging developers to think carefully about privacy management and is giving devs tools to make that task easy for users.

Top image courtesy of CandyBox Images, Shutterstock