• All Facebook, Thursday, May 13, 2010 12:11 PM

Could Facebook concede that its far-reaching Open Graph and Instant Personalization initiatives play too fast and loose with user privacy? As unlikely as that sounds, the company has called an "all hands" meeting, scheduled for 4pm PDT, today, to discuss the company's overall privacy strategy, insiders tell All Facebook.

"Facebook has come under increasing scrutiny for a number of reasons and many were left with a sour taste in their mouths following a New York Times reader Q&A with Elliot Schrage, the company's Vice President for Public Policy," All Facebook notes.

Of chief concern: "In recent months, Facebook has revised its privacy policy to require users to opt out if they wish to keep information private, making most of that information public by default," writes The New York Times. "Some personal data is now being shared with third-party Web sites."

"As a result," adds The Times, "the company has come under a blitz from privacy groups, government officials and its own users, who complain that the new policy is bewildering and the new opt-out settings too time-consuming to figure out and use."

"Perhaps Thursday's all-hands meeting is the beginning of Facebook's effort to improve user guidance on issues of sharing and privacy as Schrage mentioned, or maybe the company is considering a roll back of new features," suggests PC World.

Granted, "The relationship between privacy and Facebook is always going to be complicated," writes GigaOm. "This is the issue for the company, and will continue to be." That said, "Facebook needs its users' trust in order to provide them value ... But the company has been slipping up -- on a number of fronts."

"It's pretty obvious that changes will need to be made if Facebook is going to regain users' trust," adds All Facebook. "The most likely change will come in the form of a temporary removal of the 'Instant Personalization' service, or at the least, a shift to 'opt-in,' something many privacy advocates have been calling for."

Still, privacy advocates are calling for even further changes to Facebook's new social plug-ins, as many of them function when a user isn't logged in and there's no way for a user to opt-out from having their data being tracked.

For your viewing pleasure, the Electronic Fronier Foundation recently published a timeline of what it characterizes as Facebook's eroding privacy policy. "Facebook originally earned its core base of users by offering them simple and powerful controls over their personal information," EFF wrote in late April. "As Facebook grew larger and became more important, it could have chosen to maintain or improve those controls ... Instead, it's slowly but surely helped itself -- and its advertising and business partners -- to more and more of its users' information, while limiting the users' options to control their own information."

Read the whole story at All Facebook »