Facebook Wants You to Agree Before Everyone See’s Your Most Embarrasing Photos

How many times have you awoken with a hangover dreading the announcement on Facebook that your ‘friends’ have tagged you in a bunch of photo’s you don’t remember them taking?

Those embarrassing shots of you attempting to look sexy with your tie around your head grinding against a statue plastered around the social networking site will now only appear if you agree to it.

Thanks to Facebook’s new privacy settings, announced last night, you will now have more stringent control over content displayed on your profile and, in particular, who can see your photos.

Before this review any and all snaps that your friends tagged you in would be automatically displayed on your profile. If you didn’t want your boss to see what kind of club you tend to frequent you’d have to sprint to your puter in order to un-tag any incriminating evidence

FB has now made it so that photos you are tagged in will remain ‘pending’ until you approve the content and decide to display it on your profile. This goes for statuses and Places tags as well. Yup – that same club I mentioned before doesn’t have to appear on your Profile just because your ‘friends’ say that you were there. Of course we know you weren’t 😉

If you don’t like how you look in the photo, or think it might end in you receiving your P45 or land you in jail – a drop-down menu will allow you to easily request the photo be removed. If it was *really* bad you can even block that user from ever tagging you in content altogether!

Facebook is obviously following the lead of Google+ whose ‘Circles’ system already offers a similar utility. If you want to double-check who is seeing what, you can now select ‘view profile as…’ to see exactly what content different people will see on your profile. Nice 🙂

You’ll also now be able to tag people in posts and photos who you’re not friends with — in the same way you’d send a tweet to someone who’s not following you on Twitter. This applies to fan pages of companies and bands you have not actually ‘Liked’. Have a look at the pages of GadgetyNews and SUBSET for instance 😉

Expect to see the changes rolling out on your profile in the next few weeks.

Is this a step in the right direction or just more rubbish to work through in your already cluttered notifications?

Let me know below or, heck why not, on GN’s Facebook Page?