Facebook increases user privacy with overhauled Groups feature
by Steven Mostyn - Oct 7 2010, 08:48
Perhaps Facebook should have opted for Cliques instead of Groups. Image: Facebook.
Adding another layer of user-controlled privacy to its market-leading online service, social networking giant Facebook has introduced a new version of the Groups tab that will allow users to share specific content with select friends in a private space – without distributing it to everyone on their friends list.
“We’ve long heard that people would find Facebook more useful if it were easier to connect with smaller groups of their friends instead of always sharing with everyone they know,” commented CEO Mark Zuckerberg via the official Facebook blog.
“For some it’s their immediate family and for others it’s their fantasy football league, but the common concern is always some variant of, ‘I’d share this thing, but I don’t want to bother 250 people. Or my grandmother. Or my boss,’” he added.
Described as being as simple as “inviting your best friends over for dinner,” the overhauled Groups tool (which has a default setting of Closed for instant member-only partitioning), provides a platform for users to post photos, make plans and keep up with ongoing conversations shared between specific group members.
Each created group of friends can even be joined to an email list enabling members to share content whenever they’re not directly connected to Facebook. The new Groups feature also adds Group Chat, which allows all confirmed members to chat together online at the same time.
In related privacy news, Facebook is also set to launch a new dashboard that will provide increased visibility into how authorised software applications process user data to personalise their experience.
“As you start having more social and personalized experiences across the web, it’s important that you can verify exactly how other sites are using your information to make your experience better,” explained Zuckerberg.
Available through account privacy settings, users will find a single view containing all authorised applications, the data they’re drawing from, and when data was last accessed.
According to Facebook, users will be able to change settings parameters to determine how much information is available to an application – or they can choose to remove it completely.
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