In many respects, Facebook has reflected the personality of its co-founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg: confident if not cocky, aggressively ambitious, focused, and seemingly unconcerned about pushback about new features or programs.

This approach has attracted more than 700 million users around the world but also, in many respects, made Facebook dangerous and perhaps reckless. In particular, Facebook has either shown hubris or ignorance when it comes to the privacy of its users.

As much as Facebook tries to sell the idea that its users control their information, the company has a vested economic interest make as much of your data public. Why? The simple answer is that by knowing a lot about its users, Facebook can provide its advertisers with more targeted opportunities and, in theory, charge them higher rates.

In many respects, Facebook users play a deal with the devil because they seem willing to provide personal data in return for a “free” service. If you ask Facebook users, if they’ve checked their privacy settings recently, I would hazard to guess most of them would say “No” or, even more troubling, they would have no idea about their privacy settings.

With this in mind, it was fascinating to see Facebook introduce a major overhaul of its privacy policy earlier this week that apparently provide users with more control over how much information they disclose and, as important, who they share it with.

“We want to make this stuff unmistakably clear,” Chris Cox, vice president for product at Facebook, told the New York Times in an interview. “It has to be clear that Facebook is a leader in how people control who sees what.”

It seems like a simple statement but this is a significant change of heart by a company that ran rough-shod when it came to privacy. If you remember, Facebook once unveiled changes to privacy settings that made everything public by default rather than private. The big problem was that it didn’t tell everyone what it had done. Not good.

By providing users with more control over their information, which still seems hard to believe, Facebook has made a serious tactical concession. There are critics who suggest Facebook’s privacy settings are far from perfect but it is a step in the right direction.

The big question is why has Facebook made such an abrupt about-face when it comes to privacy. The answer may be Google+, Google’s recently-launched social network that has attracted more than 10 million users.

There is little doubt Facebook sees Google+ has a competitive threat, which has clearly forced it to do things it might have otherwise not done. If Google+ has done anything to enhance the social media landscape, getting Facebook to come cleaner (not clean, mind you!) on privacy is a huge accomplishment.