Facebook site redesign with updated privacy settings and download data

There have long been user complaints about the amount of control a user has over one's Facebook account. It appears Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has listened and responded. Personally, I have been using Facebook for about two years and have accumulated over 1,400 "friends" through actual searches and requests by and for friends, various games, other applications... and the resultant "friends of friends". While there has been a "group" function, it has not been easy to use and rather time consuming to attempt to group individuals in various groups. It remains to be seen how effective these changes will be, and whether the Facebook user community will fully accept these changes, but if the changes actually accomplish great user control, I expect the changes to be extremely popular with heavy users. Of course, there will always be the naysayers who will find any "change" aberrant. I look forward to greater privacy and security control in these features...

CLDulawan

Zuckerberg

Facebook rolling out site redesign, download my data, and updated privacy settings
Today, Facebook held a press event where they detailed several new features the company will be rolling into their popular social networking site. As Facebook explains: “Until now, Facebook has made it easy to share with all of your friends or with everyone, but there hasn’t been a simple way to create and maintain a space for sharing with the small communities of people in your life, like your roommates, classmates, co-workers and family.” Facebook is launching a suite of tools that will allow you to better organize groups of friends and control what information is shared with those groups. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted, “there is no need for all my friends to know that I had a killer run this morning, so I made a running group.” The “groups” function will play a much more prominent roll in the Facebook experience and allow users to better manage shared content and smaller circles of friends. Next, the company revealed a feature that allows users to download all of their Facebook data locally to a computer.

Facebook will also launch an enhanced privacy dashboard that will make it easier for users to revoke authorized applications and show other security related information (e.g. when the last time your Facebook data was accessed by an application).

All this will be wrapped in a new, but familiar, site refresh. Facebook has several videos detailing the new features on their site; hit the read link to check them out.

Giving You More Control