Facebook's Latest Changes Put More Control in Your Hands

On Wednesday, Facebook announced a set of changes to its user experience. Overall, these changes are clearly positive, addressing some of the issue we raised in an Open Letter to Facebook in June and re-emphasizing the company's principles of giving users control of their own information. We hope that Facebook will extend these changes to help address the "app gap" and further improve privacy and user control.

Here's a quick rundown of this week's changes and where we hope Facebook will go from here. EFF and CDT, among others, have also reviewed the changes.

Groups

What's Changed: Facebook Groups have been significantly beefed up. In addition to posting pictures, links, and other content directly to the Group, you can now create "Group docs" to collaboratively edit and have "Group chats" with all of the other members at once.

What It Means: While it's important to note that you cannot control exactly who is in a Group–even if you create the Group, any other member can invite new people to join–this is still a step forward in giving you new options and better controls over who you share information with.

What's Next: Facebook is touting Groups as a radical change to how users will interact with each other and the service. We hope it will continue to evaluate and improve Groups privacy.

Application Dashboard

What's Changed: Facebook has ramped up its Application Dashboard with additional information about the apps you run, showing you what permissions they have and even telling you when they last accessed your information.

What It Means: This is definitely a step towards giving you more transparency and control about how your information is shared with apps.

What's Next: We hope Facebook will take a step towards addressing the "app gap" and extend this Dashboard to cover not only the apps that you run yourself but every app that accesses your personal information. Giving you a better picture of how apps access your information is definitely an important step towards giving you more control.

Data Portability

What's Changed: Facebook has added the ability to easily download all of the content you've uploaded to Facebook–from photos to status updates to private messages–and other information available on your profile page–photos you've been tagged in, a list of your friend's names–in a single file.

What It Means: Having access to your own information makes it easier for you to control and use your own content without constantly going through Facebook. You can email a picture directly to a friend, read old conversations offline, or even jump ship and leave Facebook entirely with all of your content–but not your network.

What's Next: Facebook can continue to promote portability by exploring ways that users can export all of their Facebook data, including their social graph–without intruding on the privacy interests of other users whose posts or contact information might be included. We encourage Facebook to give users control over whether their content or information will be included when their friends perform a "data dump."