New Orkut Privacy Setting – Block Users from Selected Countries

With recent launch of Orkuts country-specific versions, something new was expected and it turn out to be country-specific privacy setting. You can call it Geo-privacy!

A new option is added on privacy settings page named “my networks” which let you control geographical regions from where people can view your profile or send you friend requests.

By default, it is set to county you have mentioned in your profile only. Means if you have changed your country sometime back to Estonia to enjoy Orkut Apps, you may have become unavailable to friends from your country. 😉

No worries you can change this setting to global or any number of networks. But please note that this “my networks” setting is directly linked to “everyone” options you see in other privacy settings as explained below with example taken from official orkut help page.

For example, if you choose the United States and Brazil as the only countries that can access your profile, then selecting ‘everyone’ in your other privacy settings only accounts for orkut users who are in those two countries. This is not ‘everyone’ on orkut, but only ‘everyone’ in your network. Selecting ‘friends of friends’ will also be restricted to ‘friends of friends’ within your network, so a friend of a friend who lives outside of the United States or Brazil won’t be able to see your profile.

One more thing as I mentioned in my Orkut App & Estonia hack post, Orkut restricts now changing country in your profile. An attempt to change country shows warning like below…

A nice step towards better privacy control by Orkut Team… 🙂

(via: Darnell from Inside Orkut)