Facebook changes address important privacy issues

Facebook announced several changes to its service yesterday, including a new way to organize your friends into groups, the ability to download all of your personal information, and more control over the way apps access your personal information.

Likely to be the most popular new feature with Facebook users, "Groups" lets you set up a space for people from various areas of your life—your family, coworkers, college alumni, and so on. The idea is to provide an easier way to communicate with specific folks on your Facebook Friends list. But Groups could also be a positive step toward better privacy, because now you'll be sharing information with a limited group of people instead of everyone on your Friends list.

Groups have three different settings: they can be open, closed, or secret. To Facebook's credit, the default setting of new groups is "closed," meaning the names of those in a group are visible to everyone, but posts in the group are available only to group members. The "secret" setting keeps the names of members of a group invisible as well as the posts; the "open" setting leaves everything open to everyone.

With another new feature, "Download Your Information," Facebook gathers your profile info, status updates, wall posts, videos, and photos into a Zip file that is then e-mailed to you. Several layers of security try to address privacy concerns, according to a company spokesperson, who said Facebook would "determine if more verification is needed" to ensure that the info is actually being mailed to the person who owns it.

"Stuff that you put into the site, you should be able to take out," said Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO. Zuckerberg emphasized that it's not just a link to your videos on Facebook that you'll receive but rather the actual video file. The result: You'll easily be able to take any relevant personal data from Facebook and use it on other social-networking sites or elsewhere without having to start from scratch. Such data portability is an area where Facebook has faced much criticism, but privacy advocates at the Center for Democracy and Technology say this feature is a "very bold step" toward giving users more control over their own information.

Facebook also announced a new "Dashboard" that the company says will better allow you to control which information is accessed by applications you use.

We'll check out the new features as they roll out and let you know what we think about their usefulness and the amount of protection they offer.

—Donna Tapellini