Facebook Lets You Download Your Entire Profile

Mark Zuckerberg and the guys at Facebook have shouldered a lot of criticism regarding user privacy over the last year or so. Yesterday the social networking site announced a couple of new features intent on "giving users back control."

The first of these features is an apps dashboard that allows you to see more clearly what permissions each application has. Though Facebook has always provided a long check list of app permissions allowing you to pick and choose what information you share with applications, this should make it easier for people to understand which apps are accessing what. The dashboard will show you when an application last accessed your data and if you don’t like what you see you can change the permissions of each application or remove it all together. 

Second comes the ability to download all of your Facebook activity to you computer. Everything you've ever posted on Facebook can now be downloaded as a zip file. This includes photos, status information, wall posts, and messages. To stop people on shared computers downloading the information of another user, Facebook says you'll have to input your password as well as answer relevant security questions.

Though these new features are interesting and could definitely prove useful, the biggest new addition is Groups. Some people might already make use of the ability to group certain friends together under a certain label via Facebook's Lists feature. Groups builds on that experience by offering you a way to share with just a specific group rather than your entire list of friends. However, while people using Lists may have grouped their relatives together with the intention of blocking them from seeing certain photo albums, status updates or tagged photos, this new version of Groups is aimed at people who want to share more information with just specific groups

"We've long heard that people would find Facebook more useful if it were easier to connect with smaller groups of their friends instead of always sharing with everyone they know," writes Mark Zuckerberg. "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."

Groups allows you to do just that. Let's say you want to make a group for the fantasy hockey league you're running. Once you're done adding everyone in the league, you'll have what's essentially a shared Facebook profile that every member has the ability to access and publish posts and photos to. Though these Groups pages can be open and viewable to the public, the default setting is closed, so no one can see what you and your group is talking about or sharing. To compliment this feature, Facebook is also adding Group chat so when you're on your group's page, you can start a chat that gets sent to every member.

Though it's definitely useful for clubs, roommates and colleagues, Groups doesn't really add any functionality to Lists, which has always been kind of hard to manage and difficult to maintain. While Facebook touts Groups as a way to share new information with a specific group of people, many users are busy trying to figure out how to keep their grandparents from seeing photos they've already published. For now it seems the finicky Lists feature is still the best way to do that.

Read more about the changes on the Facebook blog.