Facebook has lately been under allot of scrutiny about their privacy settings since the release of their new Open Graph API and social plugins, but now the company has finally launched brand new privacy features to address the issues.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, said that the company will not be removing all the privacy settings that users currently have available to them. Instead Facebook will be adding a one simple click solution to change permissions to friends-only, friends-of-friends, or everyone. These changes will apply to all your data even that previously published.

In addition Facebook will also be adding a simpler way for you to determine how users can find you and what people not your friends are able to see about you. Users will also now have the ability to turn off the Facebook platform, disabling any applications from getting hold of your data, and users will also have a way to opt-out of sharing the pages and stuff they like with their friends.

Facebook is expected to roll out the new changes in the next few weeks and will notify users with a message on their homepage about the new privacy features.

The way how I see it is that there was always great privacy features for Facebook where users had allot of control over who can see their data and even what data may and may not be shared with applications, it is just a matter of users don’t know about it or what it is for. When last did you sharpen up your Facebook privacy settings?

Facebook has lately been under allot of scrutiny with regards to its privacy settings, just how secure is your Facebook data and what can you do to protect it?

Facebook has been in the news since their release of the Open Graph API that enables developers to get their hands on your info without much effort, which the site Openbook demonstrates with their simple search engine for Facebook.

Good news is that there is ways to protect your data by just sharpening up your privacy settings on your privacy settings pages.

From your privacy settings page you can control exactly who has access to what data from yourself, you can even customize your profile to not enable search engines to index it and even not to allow anybody to invite you as a friend.

A group of people is calling a Quit Facebook Day on 31 May 2010 due to what they say is a lack of respect of personal data on Facebooks behalf. Currently they only have 4371 people commited to quit Facebook, I wouldn’t really go that far as to quit Facebook. I just believe people doesn’t really note the settings they have available to them to protect their data. Facebook even introduced some new settings to help protect your account from being hacked a couple of days ago.

When last have you snooped around your Facebook privacy settings page? If you are really anal about your personal data and don’t want applications of friends, or anybody for that matter, to access it just set your properties to Only Me.

I personally have most of my settings set to Friends Only with only some information available to the public like my websites for example.

The problem with most Facebook users is that they don’t even know these privacy settings exists and thus all their data is open to the rest of the world through the Open Graph API.

Its time to review your privacy settings now!