Privacy at issue in Facebook suit

By Larry Hartstein

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Facebook has added new controls that let users pick which of their friends can see posts from third-party applications, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The move comes on the heels of a class-action suit alleging the social media site's new privacy settings expose users to "identity theft, harassment, embarrassment, intrusion and all types of cyber crime."

Facebook installed new privacy settings in December. The suit, detailed by Courthouse News Service, says the new privacy settings are "difficult to use" and are not "designed to explain how a user can best protect his information and data."

The complaint quotes an expert saying, "Yes, Facebook is tricking us into exposing all our items so that those personal items get indexed in search engines -- including Facebook's -- in order to drive more traffic to Facebook."

Facebook engineer Ray C. He, in a blog post cited by the Chronicle, wrote that Facebook members can now tailor posts from third-party applications to be seen only by selected friends.

"For example, maybe you don't want all of your friends to see the humorous greeting card you just posted from an application," He wrote. "Now you can set that post to be viewable only by certain friends.

"Applications on Facebook.com and external websites and services using Facebook Connect implementations have always respected your privacy based on what you've set in the ‘Posts by Me' setting on your Privacy Settings page."

Also this week, a class-action suit was filed alleging Google Inc. broke the law when its controversial Google Buzz service shared personal data without the consent of users, the Chronicle reported. Google declined to comment on the case.