Facebook tightens privacy controls

By Isabelle Chaize

The social networking site Facebook plans to add new ways of protecting privacy for users.

Whereas now users can choose only whether to make their profile visible to all their friends, everyone on a network, or none, the new features will enable distinctions to be made between different types of relationship. Soon people will be able to choose between showing their profile to friends, family or colleagues.

Making a profile visible to a group of people means that they can view your photos, wall posts, and personal information.

Matt Cohler, vice president of product management at Facebook, said that because of the huge increase both in number of users, and the variety of age and location among those users, it was necessary to evolve beyond the original privacy controls which were intended for use by students within a college system. The site now has 67 million users, which is five times more than the amount only a year and a half ago.

The location of users also changed in the last 18 months, with over two thirds of users now situated outside the US compared to only 1 in 10 a year and a half ago.

Only a quarter of the current users keep Facebook’s default privacy settings for their profile, indicating that the way people use Facebook has changed.

‘We have a lot more users, a lot more types of users, a lot more relationships, and a lot more types of relationships,’ Cohler said.

The changes to privacy settings will not just enable users to tighten their security - a new ‘friends-of-friends’ feature will allow them to expand the group of people who can see their profile much further throughout their extended social circle

He also confirmed that in the net few weeks an online chat application will be added to Facebook, enabling users to send chat messages in real time that would archive their conversations for 90 days. Cohler did not rule out the possibility that the chat application would be compatible with other chat clients - ‘We want to be able to extend Facebook into as much of your use of the web as possible,’ he said. ‘Our vision is not to make Facebook an island.’

Last year Facebook considered the sale of user’s personal information, but had to back down after fierce criticism.