PALO ALTO, Calif. — Sept. 8, 2006 — Facebook, the Internet’s leading social utility, today announced additional controls for News Feed and Mini-Feed in response to user feedback and to reaffirm its commitment to industry-leading privacy practices. “The recent outpouring of feedback, both positive and negative, confirms the passion people feel for Facebook and its importance in their lives,” said Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO, Facebook. “We think News Feed and Mini-Feed offer something people can’t find anywhere else on the Internet. These additional privacy features put control of who sees what information in News Feed and Mini-Feed directly into the hands of our users, just as they requested.” Facebook has developed an additional privacy page that gives users granular control of how information is integrated into News Feed and Mini-Feed. The company will continue to incorporate user feedback into its development process. The new privacy page includes individual settings to block information on News Feed and Mini- Feed, including when a user: removes profile information, posts on a Wall, comments on a Note or photo, posts on a discussion board, adds a friend, removes relationship status, or leaves a group or a network. A setting to remove the time stamp of postings on Mini-Feed has also been added. In News Feed and Mini-Feed, Facebook does not publish information about Pokes, Messages, whose profile a user views, whose photos a user views, whose Notes a user reads, groups and events a user declines to join, people a user rejects as friends or people who a user removes from their Friend List.
As always, all the information displayed in News Feed and Mini-Feed is subject to the same industry-leading privacy restrictions that have made Facebook a trusted site for sharing information. People share information only with others in their networks and with confirmed friends. Facebook encourages accountability by authenticating people into defined networks.
About News Feed and Mini-Feed News Feed appears on each user’s homepage as a constantly updating list of news stories about their friends. Itis a news aggregator that reports on activity in a user’s social network and highlights relevant information about people, activities they have been involved in and other information they have chosen to share. News Feed is personalized to each user and is only viewable by that person. Mini-Feed is similar to News Feed except that it tracks the activity of one person. On each person’s profile page, Mini-Feed will display a list of that user’s activities on Facebook and can be seen by the people who, based on privacy settings, are allowed to view that profile.