Jackie Cohen, a blogger for the site AllFacebook, which tracks the social media company’s every move, said the Student Groups feature will include a “much-needed layer of security” that could protect against a rash of recent malware attacks involving fake alumni groups designed to trick Facebook members.
Cohen wrote that malware was sometimes spread through marketers or botnets posing as former college classmates.
Facebook was accessible only by people with valid “.edu” eMail addresses when the site was launched in 2004. Since then, Facebook has allowed anyone with an eMail address—academic or otherwise—to create a profile.
The site now has more than 800 million active users, including 425 million who use Facebook’s mobile application.
“At its core, [Student Groups is] about making it easier to form smaller sub-communities within the gigantic monster that is Facebook,” Bohn wrote. “The net effect is to make Facebook feel a bit more like it did in the very early days when it was only available to college students.”
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