Facebook tightens privacy controls, adds Online Chat

The online social networking directory, Facebook announced on Tuesday it is rolling out new privacy features that will give users the ability to decide who can see the data stored on their profile pages, enabling them to preserve social distinctions between friends, family and co-workers online.

In addition to giving members more control over how much personal information they share and with whom, Facebook said it will also add an online chat feature to improve communication between users.

Starting on Wednesday, Facebook users will be able to control what their friends, and friends of their friends see, meaning a user will be able to create and manage lists of friends that are granted different levels of access to information on his or her profile.

"We've introduced a standardized privacy interface that users will see when they're editing their privacy setting anywhere," said Naomi Gleit, a Facebook product manager.

The group privacy controls take advantage of “friends lists,” a feature the company introduced in December to help members organize their friends into groups. These private lists let users send messages to selected friends or filter what personal details various groups can see.

The group privacy controls take advantage of a recently introduced feature called "friends lists" that help members organize friends in their network into groups, and send one message to the entire group.

This feature, introduced in December, allows users to create up to 100 different "friends lists."

Founded by Zuckerberg and his Harvard buddy, Dustin Moskovitz in February 2004, the Palo Alto, California based, Facebook is the Internet’s second-largest social network, with more than 67 million active users worldwide. The site allows people to communicate with their friends and exchange information.

The company confirmed yesterday that it is working on a new instant messaging chat feature that runs inside Facebook, allowing users to see which of their friends are logged on and start chatting with them one-on-one.

The feature, called Facebook Chat, will be part of the browser, and will not require any special software downloads, the company said.

The new chat system, which will be launched in two weeks, works with all browsers. "When you log in to the site there is a Chat (user interface) at the bottom of the browser...It's unobtrusive and there when you need it," said product manager Peter Deng.

Currently, the chat feature lacks some tools that are running in other instant messaging programs, such as the ability to simultaneously chat with multiple people in one room or to indicate that a person is logged on but is too busy to chat. Although, all conversations in Facebook Chat will be archived for 90 days, but a user can delete them any time.

"We want Facebook to be part of your experience all over the Web," Matt Cohler, vice president of strategy and business operations said. "Our business is not to make Facebook an island."

Facebook has been criticized in the past for breaching the site users’ privacy. In 2006, the company introduced "news feed," an application that sends updates on a user's activities to people in their network.

On November 7, 2007, Facebook announced a marketing initiative, known as Facebook Beacon, which included a system for websites to allow users to share chosen information about their activities on the sites with their Facebook friends.

MoveOn.org, an online political action group last year had launched an online petition calling on Facebook to apply Beacon only to users who have specifically opted in to the system. It described the scheme (Beacon) as a "huge privacy violation".