Facebook always attracts eyeballs in the world of news. I basically click FB news first after I had a good glance of Sydney Morning Herald online in the morning while sipping my coffee. While maybe not only SMH, many major newspapers published this story—‘Facebook users 'don't want complete privacy': Zuckerberg said. FB has been sending personal and identifiable user information to advertisers without getting consent from users.

Right, FB does’t even asks you if you want to opt-in info. or not when a new person sign up. Zuckerberg said “we just build it, and people will use it (as is).” People are furious about his comment and ignorance about the user privacy. The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy comments that ''Facebook, I understand … was developed by Harvard University student Mark Zuckerberg, who after breaking up with his girlfriend developed a website of all the photos from his yearbook so he and his mates could rank the girls according to their looks. An auspicious start for Facebook”. But nowadays 400million people are on it which demonstrates its success. Lots of people are crazy about it, updating status, uploading photos all the time.

Zuckerberg said he had yet to respond to the recent privacy furore because "i'd like to show an improved product rather than just talk about things we might do. We're going to be ready to start talking about some of the new things we've built this week,” Which does make sense to many of us giving the idea he want to act instead of talk himself out of it. However, he also said "It isn't that they want secrecy. It's that they want control over what they share and what they don't," The comments may be read with a hint of irony for some users who have battled to seize control of their profile pages due to the sheer complexity of the privacy settings. The current privacy policy has 50 different settings and 170 options.

Further, some have questioned Zuckerberg's sincerity as he has continually played down privacy problems with the site and reportedly said in leaked chat logs that users who trusted him with their information were "dumb f---s". There are also a few cases recently in Australia that girls met boys from Facebook got killed. These are all bad publicities for Facebook, which quite ironic for a social networking site, it seems like clapping on the face of itself.
I do use Facebook, however I did question how much privacy is protected, you can see the profiles of friend’s friend’s friend… the people you have never met, or never will in your life, but you see their half-naked party photos. How weird is that!

I also ask friends around the globe for their thoughts about using Facebook, the answers are different, although most of them feel the privacy is an issue which does bother them, however, with varied degree. Some said till now they haven’t faced any serious issues..but once that happens, they would consider deleting their profile. Some felt that Facebook had gone off the rails and could be damaged permanently if this can’t be sorted out.

What if there is a as good or better social networking site launching in market right now with much better security/privacy features?