Facebook adds privacy controls, plans chat feature

By Eric Auchard

PALO ALTO, California (Reuters) - Facebook said on Tuesday it is introducing new privacy controls that give users of the fast-growing social-network site the ability to preserve social distinctions between friends, family and co-workers online.

Facebook executives told reporters at the company's Palo Alto, California headquarters of changes that will allow Facebook's more than 67 million active users worldwide to control what their friends, and friends of their friends see.

The Silicon Valley company was founded in 2004 as a social site for students at Harvard University and spread quickly to other colleges and eventually into work places. Its popularity stems from how the site conveniently allows users to share details of their lives with selected friends online.

While part of Facebook's appeal has been the greater degree of privacy controls it offers users compared with other major social network sites, the site has also been the target of two major rebellions by its users in response to new features many felt exposed previously private information to wider view.

Matt Cohler, Facebook's vice president of product management, told reporters the company was seeking to evolve beyond the simple privacy controls originally aimed at relatively homogenous groups of college-age users.

"We have a lot more users, a lot more types of users, a lot more relationships, we have a lot more types of relationships," Cohler said.

But only 25 percent of existing users have bothered to take control of their privacy using Facebook's existing personal information settings, the company said in a statement.

Use of Facebook has exploded fivefold over the past year and a half. Two-thirds of its users are now located outside the United States compared with about 10 percent 18 months ago, when most members were student age and in the United States.