Facebook today rolls out several new ways to help people manage
their personal information, said Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, from an event at their corporate headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif.
The largest initiative, written from the ground-up, is to allow users to keep some data private or limited to a small subset of your friends. "A lot of people talk about this as a privacy problem," said Zuckerberg. "I think it's an annoying problem." The product is called Groups. With the goal in mind of sharing information with smaller, organic clusters of people, each "group" includes three parts: a shared space, group chat and e-mail lists.
Though the demo did not show the particulars of these features clearly, the gist is that it's not purely "algorithmic" — that is to say, there's no computer telling you who is in which groups. But it's not wholly your responsibility to create those groups, either. The groups is an improvement on the previous "friend list" feature, which apparently only 5 percent or so actually use. The point is to create a group, and invite people who would then, responsibly, invite others who fit the group's context ("family," "softball team," etc.).
The company rolled out a few other nice tools for handing personal info. "Download Your Information" allows people to collect everything they've uploaded to Facebook in one simple Zip file. When you open it on your computer, it pops open your Web browser so you can easily skim all the contents. The feature will be protected by multiple safeguards, including an extra log-in, and a visual authenticity test.
"Applications You Use" is a page that shows you not only what permissions you've granted apps, but what information they're actually using. Each app you've used is listed, and you can click on them to get a log of the private information they've accessed over time.
The trick, Zuckerberg says, is giving people "really good controls that are simple enough to use that people use them and are powerful enough to apply to a large variety of contexts." Facebook has not necessarily met these goals in the past, at least according to many users. Perhaps these new features, many of which will be rolled out today on Facebook.com, will allow people to feel more secure, perhaps even empowered, in their social networking.
UPDATE: Our very own Helen A.S. Popkin has tested the Groups feature, and penned an in-depth look at its good and evil natures.
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