Facebook Introduces New Features, Greater Privacy Controls

Facebook, which of late has been in the midst of a raging privacy controversy has just announced a set of new features which according to them would offer greater control to the end user. New feature additions include Groups and the option to download your entire profile information to a zipped file – should you need it.

Lets now delve a bit deeper to see what these features could possibly end up doing to your Facebook account.

Groups

While Facebook already had a groups feature, it came with little or no controls. The upcoming version of groups would offer far more options to to the user so that you can choose what to share with whom. For example, if you wish to share a photo album that you would only want your immediate family members to see (assuming all of them are on Facebook), you can create a group with just these members and share the images. In its current form, the images you upload are visible to all your immediate friends and these might also include your boss. God forbd if he/she sees a picture of you enjoying a drink when you were supposed to be down with fever! You know what I am saying right?

The Groups feature would also minimise a lot of clutter you see on your Facebook “timeline” since a lot of content that would be of no interest to you would be potentially filtered. Interestingly, the Groups feature is somewhat “open” in that your friends can actually see the name of the group and its members in it. They are just restricted to the contents of the group. Of course you can also create a secret group for sharing stuff that you definitely do not want any others to see. We wonder why use Facebook in that case then!?

Apart from this, users within groups can now group chat with. I was not a very big fan of the Facebook chat. But then, this sure looks worth a try.

Download Data

This is quite interesting. All those important data you uploaded to Facebook over the years is now available to you – offline should you want them. You can download all of it in the form a compressed file. “We’ve built an easy way to quickly download to your computer everything you’ve ever posted on Facebook and all your correspondences with friends: your messages, Wall posts, photos, status updates and profile information,” said Mark Zuckerberg while announcing the launch of this feature. This “download all data” feature is only accessible after the user passes through multiple security checks. Facebook has started rolling out this feature so you might want to keep checking.

Applications

If you have been perennially worried as to how your data is being shared with third party applications (which are rampant on Facebook), you might be glad to learn that the applications dashboard offers far greater transparency and shows how your data is used by these applications.

Overall, we think this overhaul should go a good way in silencing Facebook critics. But we wonder if they could be kept silent for quite long. What do you folks think?