More Ways to Control What You See in Your News Feed on facebook

Users will be able to more easily hide people from their News Feed

News Feed is where you go to catch up on what’s happening with your friends and find the content that matters to you.

What you do in News Feed helps determine what you see in News Feed. You decide who you want to connect to, and what Pages and public figures you want to follow.

Starting today, there will be more ways for you to control and give feedback on your News Feed.

Quickly Unfollow and re-follow people, Pages and Groups

News Feed settings will now show a list of the top people, Pages and Groups that you’ve seen in your News Feed over the past week. You can choose to sort by people, Pages or Groups posts, or see an overall summary. Unfollow any friend, Page or Group if you don’t want to see their stories in your News Feed. You can also see who you’ve unfollowed in the past and can choose to re-follow them at anytime.

New ways to give feedback about your News Feed

If you see a story you’re not interested in or don’t want to see, you can tap the arrow in the top right of that story to hide it. Starting today, when you hide a story you’ll have the option to ask to see less from that person or Page.

If you choose to see less, you are then given the option to unfollow them if you don’t want to see any of their stories in your News Feed. You can always visit News Feed settings to see everything you’ve unfollowed and have the option to re-follow them.

News Feed settings will be available starting today on desktop and mobile. The new options for giving feedback about your News Feed will be available today on desktop, and coming to mobile in the coming weeks. 

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How To: Create a Facebook app shortcut

 The Facebook app is one of the most popular ones in Windows 8x, especially in tablets. With all of the latest tweaks, using the Windows Start screen is not the chore it used to be but some people still prefer using the desktop to reach their apps. If you are one of those people, you can create a shortcut for the app and then place it wherever you like, including the taskbar for quick and easy access. In case you had not realized already, the Facebook app is not included with Windows. You will have to go through the Store to download and install it first.

Go to your desktop, right click on an empty area and select New > Shortcut. Type or copy and paste in the following command in the first field:

explorer message-facebook-com:

Click on Next, give the shortcut an appropriate name and click on Finish. You are now free to customize the shortcut in any way you want and place it somewhere that is convenient for you.

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Facebook's government user data requests up 24%

Requests by governments for Facebook's user data are up by nearly a quarter in the first half of this year compared to the previous six months.

Global government requests were up by 24% to almost 35,000 in the first six months, the social media giant said.

The amount of Facebook content restricted because of local laws also rose about 19% in the same period.

News of the increase comes as Facebook fights its largest ever US court order to hand over data from 400 people.

Photographs, private messages and other information involving people in a benefit fraud trial were given to a New York court last year, but the request was only made public in August.

"We're aggressively pursuing an appeal to a higher court to invalidate these sweeping warrants and to force the government to return the data it has seized," the social media giant said in a blog on Tuesday.

The world's largest social network also said that they "scrutinize" every government request for legal sufficiency and "push back hard when we find deficiencies or are served with overly broad requests."

Privacy

Facebook has been under fire for its use of user data in recent years, fuelling online privacy concerns.

Last month, Facebook admitted that it would change the way it does research on users after a controversial experiment where it manipulated some users newsfeeds to affect their emotions.

Meanwhile, the tech giant has rolled out a series of features this year to help users protect their personal information.

In April, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg introduced new features that allowed users to limit the amount of personal information they share with third-party mobile apps.

In 2012, Facebook had settled privacy charges with US authorities over a case that it had deceived users and forced them to share more personal information than they had intended.

In September, Google reported a 15% increase in the number of requests in the first half of this year compared to the prior six months, and a 150% rise in the last five years, from governments around the world to reveal user information for criminal investigations.

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