Facebook, which has taken a public relations beating in the past over privacy issues, has enhanced the mobile version of its site to include access to privacy settings. 
This move follows an overhaul to the settings that the company rolled out in May, largely in response to criticisms about what was being shared in the past and how much control users had over managing the sharing.
In a blog post today, Facebook said today that it recognizes that plenty of people are interacting with their Facebook account from mobile phones and wanted to give them the ability to go in and make granular settings from their mobile devices. From Facebook’s post:
As mobile devices have become more sophisticated and widespread, we’ve noticed that people are creating content and accessing Facebook at every moment of the day, in many locations—not just from desktops. Wherever you are connecting and sharing through Facebook, you should be able to make real time decisions over your information. Now you can.
Interestingly enough, access to the settings are through the mobile browser, not device-specific Facebook apps.
On one hand, that’s a good thing because it allows Facebook to offer the feature to all of its mobile customers in one shot, without having to roll out new apps. On the other hand, it illustrates how apps could become irrelevant over time if browser-based sites offers more functionality.
Facebook launched an update to its Android app yesterday - and, only after a short time with it, I’m pretty impressed with the user interface and functionality. But I’m also pretty familiar with the mobile web version and can’t help but wonder why I would need both.
The new feature will be rolled out throughout the day.
