Facebook staff and CEO Mark Zuckerberg will meet today to discuss the social network’s growing privacy problems.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
According to sources, no official privacy changes will be announced at the meeting.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Facebook seems to find itself at the center of the online privacy debate regularly.<\/p>\n
A 2007 network rollout called Beacon that published Facebook user activity on other websites to their Facebook profile created a firestorm of privacy criticism.<\/p>\n
In 2009 Facebook implemented changes to user privacy options that opened up personal information to everyone on the social network, instead of just friends.<\/p>\n