With Facebook’s new Groups feature you can limit who you share information with. However, some privacy problems might occur.

by Rune H. Rasmussen

Facebook Groups is designed to limit some of your communications to smaller circles of friends within your overall list of Facebook friends. The new feature is an effective way of posting relevant updates, photos, videos and other material within specific groups – allowing you to share relevant information with a selection of friends, without bothering all of your friends with topics that are not interesting for everyone.

In an interview, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said:
"There are a lot of things you want to share with all your friends at once, but there are also things that you only want to share with your family or some co-workers. If you don't have a way to do that, you just won't share them at all."

Might cause privacy problems
In theory, the new feature provides users with additional privacy, because anything you post in a group is seen only by members of that group. However, if you're not careful, groups can get out of hand. Any member of a group have the possibility to add members from his or her own friends list, even if they're not friends with anyone else in the group, including the group's administrator. In fact, you could end up sharing information with complete strangers.

How to manage Groups
As well as this, anyone can be added to a group by a friend, and they don’t get the chance to either accept or reject the invitation. If you don’t want to be a member, you can always leave a group by entering the group’s Facebook page and clicking "Leave Group" in the upper right corner. The administrator (by default, the person who created the group) can remove people from the group, but he or she does not get to approve or reject new members.

It might be a good idea to click on the "See All" link in any Group you're in at regular intervals.  If you don't want to be sharing information with certain members, or, if you're not comfortable with being a part of a specific group, you should consider leaving the group.

Another potential problem is that the membership list is public information by default. However, there is a way to create a secret group.

There are three types of groups:
•    Public: Membership list and contents are accessible to anyone.
•    Open: The default setting – public membership list, private contents.
•    Secret: Everything, even the existence of the group, is private.

Read more:

CNET
Facebook Groups: Double-edged sword for privacy

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