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!

Facebook the Social Networking giant has released a set of tools to help users in knowing when someone logs into their accounts from unknown computers.

In a blog post on the official Facebook blog, software engineer Lev Popov, introduced the new features and emphasized that Facebook is constantly working on new ways to protect their users from scams and keeping their information and accounts secure.

This is kind of ironic seeing as Facebook has been in the press repeatedly in the past due to their privacy policies.

Facebook has introduced two new features that will help protect users’ accounts, the first being Login Notifications and the other Blocking Suspicious Logins, this just a few weeks after they introduced their new OpenGraph API and Social Tools.

The Login Notifications is just what is says, users can set up their accounts so that they receive an Email or SMS message when someone logs into their account from an unknown computer. You can specify multiple computers you normally work on from your accounts settings page and enable to either receive notifications by Email or both SMS and Email when your account is being accessed by a computer not on your list.

As an extra measure of security Facebook will also monitor your account for suspicious activity and block logins if they think someone is trying to gain unauthorized access to your account. Measures taken to unblock your account will include asking you personal questions from your data or asking you to identify someone in a picture next to you.

Facebook has designed the questions to be easy to you and hard for the person trying to gain access to your account.

I really like the way Facebook has approached this and glad there is now some form of extra security available to users, you’d be surprise how many Facebook users’ password is something like their birth date or just simply 123456.

When it comes to social networking it is without a doubt that Facebook is the leader with over 400 million users. The dream of four NYU student is to change that by focusing on Facebooks non existing privacy with their open source alternative called Diaspora.

Diaspora’s aim is to provide a privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network.

The question is whether Diaspora will succeed in becoming a competitor to Facebook. Up until now open source alternatives to popular social networking giants hasn’t had any success, identica almost came close, will this be the same for Diaspora?

Diaspora has asked bidders on online fundraising site Kickstart for an amount of $10,000 which they initially aimed to get in 39 days. Response to Diaspora’s funding request has been so good that they already have their total bids standing at $87,940 in only a matter of 12 days.

Diaspora’s aim is to have everybody control their own social network and have them decide to whom they want to display their information and when they want to display it.

If Diaspora will succeed in their quest to give users a more personal and private social network we will just have to see. There is still a couple of days of funding left and I wouldn’t be surprised if they reach the one million dollar mark.

Would you use a service like Diaspora rather than Facebook if it means you have more control over your information?

This morning while posting something on Facebook I noticed a new popup that grabbed by attention. It was a small lock next to the share button and upon clicking it I discovered some real handy new privacy settings.

You now have the choice to customize with who you would like to share certain statuses or links you post. A nice addition is the fact that you can customize it to a degree where you can only allow a selected few friends to see the status or link, or disallow a selected few friends from seeing it.

This sure is a great feature and one that was needed a long time ago. I see the ladies gossiping even more now via Facebook.