With all of the recent controversy over Facebook privacy, we wanted to share this helpful video that shows you how to control your Facebook privacy settings.

Facebook staff and CEO Mark Zuckerberg will meet today to discuss the social network’s growing privacy problems.

Criticism of Facebook’s privacy practices is reaching a fevered pitch about how the world’s largest social network uses and shares the personal information of its users.

According to sources, no official privacy changes will be announced at the meeting.

Recent Facebook changes like “instant personalization” which can automatically import a Facebook member’s personal profile data into sites like Pandora and Yelp, have only added fuel to the privacy fires that Facebook is now confronting.

This month over a dozen privacy watchdog groups, including the Electronic Privacy Information Center, filed a complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission against Facebook for sharing user information with third-party web sites without getting user approval.

Facebook’s growing database of personal user information is seen as a valuable asset to marketers, who use the information to target advertising to niche groups of people.

Facebook seems to find itself at the center of the online privacy debate regularly.

A 2007 network rollout called Beacon that published Facebook user activity on other websites to their Facebook profile created a firestorm of privacy criticism.

In 2009 Facebook implemented changes to user privacy options that opened up personal information to everyone on the social network, instead of just friends.

[ Source: Reuters.com ]

Mining tweets on Twitter can be as reliable as conducting lengthy, labor-intensive public opinion polls.

A recent study from Carnegie Mellon found that sampling and analyzing Twitter tweets for data is as good as conducting an opinion poll in some cases.

According to the Twitter study, computer analysis of opinions expressed in a billion Twitter tweets during the period 2008-2009 found that measures of both consumer confidence and presidential job approval mirrored those published in public opinion polls.

Researcher Noah Smith believes the results show that analyzing the words found in streams of tweets could someday become an economical and fast way to measure public opinion on some issues.

However, he cautioned that data mining tools used to analyze public opinions on social networks are too new to know what extent they can be relied on for measuring public sentiment.

Smith noted that approximately 7 million Twitter tweets are posted every day, which could allow data mining pollsters to measure public opinion very quickly.

[ Source: India Times ]

Every wondered what Facebook is for? Or maybe you are an avid Facebook user and think you already know the answer. Either way, this short animated video takes an honest and funny look at the modern Facebook addiction.

As Facebook privacy problems grow and people learn that Facebook often shares their personal information with third party data mining sites, more users are opting to quit the Facebook social network.

A Google search for “how to quit Facebook” finds over 18 million results. In addition, some prominent technology professionals, like Google’s Matt Cutts, are removing their Facebook profiles.

Peter Rojas, founder of the Engadget and Gizmodo blogs, told ABC News recently about his decision to quit Facebook: “I was spending more time managing my account than actually using my account. Having to constantly monitor the privacy settings was way too complicated. You can never be sure if you actually caught everything.”

Facebook gives people two ways to halt their use of the social network:

[1] Deactivate – found under your account settings, this option freezes your Facebook profile and removes it from searches on Facebook, but all of your information is saved in case you decide to reactivate your account in the future.

Deactivated Facebook profiles are removed from community pages. Tags on pictures are removed. Facebook status updates are removed.

Users are allowed to keep their Facebook profiles deactivated for an unlimited amount of time.

[2] Delete – this is your nuclear option for ending your Facebook profile. You can find out how to delete your Facebook account by visiting their Help Center and searching for “delete account”. Facebook waits 14 days to remove deleted user profiles.

According to Facebook policy, some profile information can be kept by Facebook for “technical reasons.”

DiggNation Video discussing why one user decided to quit using Facebook and the other social network alternatives –