Facebook to Offer New Features to Allow Users to Control Privacy of Information

Facebook's biggest asset — its population of more than 200 million users — is also part of its Achilles' heel. As more people join and connect with more people they know, the chances grow that one's embarrassing photographs from a night of carousing might be seen by the wrong person. To help remedy this, the company is testing new controls that will allow members to specify which groups or individuals are able to see each text update, photo or video they post on the site. For now the new features are available only to a limited number of users, but the company said it planned to provide them eventually to everyone on the site. The changes are part of Facebook's effort to simplify its privacy settings, which had ballooned to more than six pages and 40 different options. The company said that fewer than a quarter of its users regularly adjusted privacy settings, so it planned to condense them into a single, easy-to-navigate page.