Facebook lifting privacy restrictions for teens means young people can post information publicly for first time

Facebook is lifting the restrictions, allowing 13-17 year-olds to make posts visible to anyone

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Teens on Facebook will soon be able to share their posts with anyone else on the Internet.

Facebook is lifting the restrictions on how young people can use the social networking site, allowing 13-17 year-olds to make posts visible to anyone.


They added:"We take the safety of teens very seriously," so are making sure that users know exactly what they're doing when they set a post to public.


Posts will include a pop-up reminder telling young Facebookers that their content that they're about to post will be viewable by anybody, and give them an option to change the post's privacy setting.

If they choose to continue making the post publically, they will get an additional reminder to confirm their privacy setting before the post goes through.

However, while Facebook is now letting young people post publicly, it is changing automatic privacy settings to make their posts more secure.

Until now, the automatic setting for under-17s was visible to "friends of friends" - which could actually reach hundreds of thousands of people, depending on how many Facebook friends you have.

Now the automatic setting has been changed to "friends only". This is being hailed as a positive change, as most people never bother to alter the automatic settings.

Facebook seem to be relaxing privacy restrictions across the board, removing the option to be un-searchable last week.