Facebook has added yet another module to the refreshed Timeline design: Groups. Starting today, users will see a place on their Timeline showing open groups they’ve joined. Facebook says this is another way to show off their interests with others who visit their profile.
Facebook launched another initiative aimed at keeping teens safe on the social network, teaming up with the National Association of Attorneys General on a consumer-education program aimed at teens and their parents, elements of which will be hosted on the Facebook Safety page.
When Facebook announced last December that it would roll out new privacy options for users, the social network also said it would change the permissions process for applications, requiring them to break down information they were seeking access to in multiple screens, rather than bunching all of the information together in one permissions screen. Now different renditions of this are being tested.
Facebook officially confirmed that it will roll out the addition of emoticons and actions in status updates, which many users already have access to, saying that U.S. users will get the new feature “in the coming weeks.”
The Facebook Antivirus Marketplace is now available in seven new languages: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Korean, Japanese, and Portuguese.
Despite assurances by Facebook that its new Home overlay for Android devices does not pose any privacy or security risks, some experts in the field remained unconvinced when it comes to corporate networks.
Facebook’s ad-targeting capabilities took a giant step forward with Wednesday’s launch of partner categories, which allow brands on the social network to show ads to users based not only on their Facebook activity, but their activity across the Web, via both desktop and mobile, and even their offline purchases and tendencies.
When Facebook announced Home, a heavily integrated mobile platform for Android phones, many people were worried that it represented just another invasion of privacy by the social network. While Facebook will become a bigger part of users’ mobile experiences, the company swears that Home does not take any more information than its native application or the desktop version of the site. Facebook’s Michael Richter (chief privacy officer) and Erin Egan (chief privacy officer of policy) attempted to address users’ concerns in a recent blog post.
According to application security provider MyPermissions, more than 70 billion mobile apps will be downloaded in 2013, or 10 for every person on Earth. MyPermissions examined 10 million apps with access to Facebook and found the following risks for users who are not careful about managing permissions for those apps:
A research team at the University of Southern California developed a tool that encrypts photos, but only portions of those photos, so that authorized users can still view them.
