Facebook still being slammed over privacy issues

Social networking site Facebook has called a general meeting of its staff to discuss the continuing issue of the site's attitude to user privacy.

The popular site bas been coming in for growing criticism over the past few months in relation to the way it treats users' details, and how it allows those details to be shared with others, or used by third parties. In particular, changes to its privacy settings have been accused of being over-complicated, making it more difficult for users to control what information is seen by whom.

The company's vice president for public policy, Elliot Schrage, recently defended Facebook's position on privacy in a Q&A session with readers of the New York Times. He admitted that the privacy controls were 'too confusing' but added that the problems were fixable. However, the Q&A did little to reassure Facebook users, and now a crisis meeting has been called internally to decide how to proceed.

American digital liberties organisation the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) described the situation: "Facebook originally earned its core base of users by offering them simple and powerful controls over their personal information. As Facebook grew larger and became more important, it could have chosen to maintain or improve those controls. Instead, it's slowly but surely helped itself — and its advertising and business partners — to more and more of its users' information, while limiting the users' options to control their own information."

Whether Facebook's slightly cavalier attitude to privacy is just poor judgement, or a sign of something more sinister is unclear; but at least now it seems that the company is responding to increased public pressure and looking at tackling the issue.