New Facebook Features Enhance Privacy

Facebook introduced three new features which go a long way with helping privacy-concerned users feel more at ease in their activity on the social network.

Facebook has long been seen as a privacy risk due to the lack of proper and easy to understand controls and its general "opt-out" mentality of sharing everything unless otherwise specified.

Until now, Facebook users who care about their privacy had to stop and think very hard before posting a picture or writing something on their wall, because maybe some people in their friends list should not be seeing it.

On Facebook these friends lists grow large pretty fast and even though people tend to be closer to some friends than others, there's used to be no easy way to make this distinction.

Enter the redesigned Facebook Groups feature, which now allows exactly that – defining small groups of friends and share certain information only with them.

Even the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), one of the leading civil liberties watchdogs, which has long criticized Facebook's approach to privacy, has congratulated the company for the new feature.

"EFF is very pleased with today’s Groups revamp, which we hope will provide users with a powerful new tool for managing their privacy on the Facebook site," the foundation said.

Another feature announced by Facebook is a new dashboard for controling applications and websites, which is now available under the account's privacy settings.

This dashboard will not only list what apps have access to a user's profile, but will also display what particular permissions each of them has been granted along with an option to revoke them.

This feature is great in the context of the large number of Facebook scams that involve rogue applications asking users for access to their profiles and then posting spam messages on their walls.

The third new feature allows users to download all data they submitted to the site, such as pictures, messages, etc., as a .zip archive. This can be done for backup purposes or in the event that someone wants to delete their account.

"While EFF continues to have outstanding issues with Facebook, we greatly appreciate these important steps toward giving Facebook users more transparency and control when it comes to how the information they post to Facebook is shared, and more power to take their Facebook data with them if they ever choose to leave the service," the foundation concludes.