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Facebook’s privacy policies, nowadays, are facing more and more criticism. Recently, an embarrassing technical glitch exposed Facebook users’ private chat to others.

For some time period, private chats of some users were openly viewable in the public due to a privacy settings feature defect. This feature allows a user to select how his/her profile is displayed to other users. By influencing control over the “preview my profile” feature, some individuals were able to see their friends’ pending friend requests and private chat messages. Well-known blog, TechCrunch, was the first to report this hitch.

The ‘chat’ feature of the social networking site was suspended for several hours and more than 400 million users were affected worldwide. However, with considerable effort, the engineers were able to fix the bug in the software to bring Facebook online.

A Facebook spokeswoman was quoted as saying, “We worked quickly to resolve this matter, ensuring that once the bug was reported to us, a solution was quickly found and implemented.”

The problem came up when Facebook is already facing huge criticism from privacy campaigners. Executive Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Centre in the US, Marc Rotenberg said, “The privacy goof-up emphasized the need for greater inspection of the company.” He further added, “Our view is that the Federal Trade Commission [FTC] needs to act on consumer concerns about Facebook’s sloppy privacy and security practices.”

Last month too, Facebook changed the manner in which a user’s private profile information is treated.  Now, a feature has been added that requires the data about an individual’s education, home town, and hobbies be attached to public pages dedicated to those topics.

At a function in San Francisco, Facebook also released new plug-ins and software tools that website designers and developers can insert in their websites which allow internet users to view personalized versions of sites they visit – provided they are Facebook members. Once a new “like” button is activated on their web pages, sites are customized for users based on their Facebook friends list, favorite activities and various other aspects users display on their profiles.

An online Civil Liberties Group, The Electronic Frontier Foundation, has severely condemned the new changes, alleging that they lower an individual’s control over his/her personal information and also fail to present an straightforward “opt-out” choice. Reacting to this, four US senators wrote to the chief executive of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, last week to handle the ‘changes’ issue.

Candid Wueest of Symantec said, “Privacy breaches are worrying for any organization. Unfortunately, this isn’t the first privacy breach of its kind. Other high-profile sites have also been affected with similar problems. Privacy settings lead people to be a little freer in the content they share on social networking sites. It enables users to have control over who can see the content posted. It is therefore important that all social networking sites regularly review the policies in which the privacy settings fit.”