As more people put more sensitive information on Facebook, it’s becoming increasingly important to give users better ways to control who sees that data and how it’s used. At a press conference in Palo Alto today, Mark Zuckerberg and company unveiled three big enhancements to the way users interact with their Facebook accounts, with the underlying theme of privacy.
First, users can now download everything they’ve ever posted on Facebook, including all correspondences between friends, all photos and video they’ve been tagged in, and their friends list as a single zipped file.
Second, a new dashboard in the privacy settings menu gives users a better look into how third-party applications and connected sites use personal data. With over 1,000,000 Facebook connect services active today, it is not uncommon to log into a site using your Facebook ID once and never use it again. This dashboard lets users know exactly with whom they’re sharing.
Third, a completely revamped Facebook Groups for collaborative sharing, chatting, and event planning with smaller, more controlled groups in mind. This is the biggest change of the three, and the one which Facebook executives spent the most time discussing today.
via In the name of privacy, Facebook revamps groups, dashboard, data portability.
