Facebook loosens privacy restrictions to allow under

Facebook is loosening its privacy settings for under-18s. Photograph: Dado Ruvic/Reuters

Facebook has removed a restriction for users under 18 that limited who could see their online posts.

Facebook said teenagers would now be able to manually alter the setting and share information with the public. Until now, posts by those who registered their age as less than 18 could be viewed only by their friends, and by friends of their friends.

'Teens are among the savviest people using of social media, and whether it comes to civic engagement, activism, or their thoughts on a new movie, they want to be heard,' Facebook said in an announcement of the changes.

'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,' the company said.

Facebook is under increasing competition for younger users from a new crop of mobile and social services, such as SnapChat and WhatsApp.

The executive director of the non-profit Center for Digital Democracy, Jeffrey Chester, said Facebook was sacrificing the safety and privacy of teenage users to further its business.

'Teens don't necessarily have good judgment and to the extent that they make themselves visible to the wider public, there's all kind of people - from predators to junk food marketers - who are surveilling Facebook for new kinds of targets,' Chester said.

Other social media services also allow teens to share information with the broader public. But Chester said the amount of personal information users had on Facebook was much more extensive than on other social services, where users can create accounts with pseudonyms.

Facebook said teenage users would now also be allowed to use the 'Follow' feature, which lets strangers automatically receive public posts from another user without requiring that the two be connected on the service as mutual friends.

Facebook's manager of privacy and public policy, Nicky Jackson Colaco, said the changes would allow teenagers to share information that might benefit from dissemination to a broader audience, such as information about fundraising efforts, or a teen rock band trying to promote an upcoming performance.

The 16-year-old Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai would not have been able to use Facebook as a broad communication channel under the previous policy, said Stephen Balkam, of the Family Online Safety Institute, a non-profit body that receives funding from several internet companies, including Facebook.

Facebook said it would show teenage users a special notice the first couple of times they attempted to post information to the public, reminding the user that the post can be seen by anyone.

The restrictions on teen use of Facebook's private messaging feature will not change, with users under 18 able to receive messages only from their friends and from friends of their friends.