The login page for Facebook, which reportedly boasts 350 million users worldwide.

Having spent most of 2009 implementing changes and tweaks to its site-wide privacy policies, the popular social media and networking site Facebook unveiled yet another series of changes on December 9. Foremost among these was the elimination of “networks”, which had previously allowed people who lived or worked in a certain area or went to school at a particular institution to share social information. The new privacy settings now allow the site’s users to control who sees posts, content, and media uploaded to personal profiles and pages.

The change has been seen as being motivated by a need to compete with Internet titans such as Google, Yahoo, and Twitter – Facebook’s aim is reportedly to become the ultimate repository and source for what people on the Internet are doing in real time. Consequently, it has to compete with the search engines, where the search results are starting to integrate the content sourced from social media and networking.

Facebook is also seen to be responding to Twitter with the new privacy controls. One security level now available in Facebook is a choice where users can choose to share all the information on their profiles with the entire Internet. Twitter already does this; all “tweets” and profile information of its membership are completely visible to the public.

Almost immediately after the new privacy controls took effect, however, users and bloggers from all over the Internet began to level negative criticisms at the site. Claims that Facebook is “nudging the users to set their privacy settings so as to disclose everything” are being made, and users are reportedly unhappy that the following pieces of data are now, by default, visible to all: name, city, gender, profile photo, “fan of” pages, and, most importantly, the “friends list”.

The new privacy settings, critics charge, may mislead inattentive Facebook users. A “maddening” lack of clarity in the transition page to the new settings might lead people to unintentionally make parts of their profiles accessible to the entire Internet without meaning to. And the problem with that is that once information has been released to the search engines and the general Internet at large, it’s extremely difficult to take that information back.

MyQuezonCity.com recommends an active and hands-on approach to not only Facebook, but also one’s general presence on the Internet. Here is a guide to the new Facebook privacy settings.

Don’t rely exclusively on the transition tool that was used when the new privacy settings were released. That tool recommended security levels for certain parts of a user’s profile – for example, it recommends that a user’s name, family and relationships, work and education, and posts were automatically set so that everyone could see it.