The grousing about Facebook’s recent privacy changes is now an official complaint.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center, along with eight other groups, filed a complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission on Thursday urging the regulator to open an investigation into Facebook’s new privacy settings.
Facebook’s privacy changes “violate user expectations, diminish user privacy and contradict Facebook’s own representations,” reads the 29-page complaint, which accuses the world’s No.1 Internet social networking company of engaging in unfair and deceptive practices.
The complaint comes a week after Facebook unveiled sweeping new privacy changes that it said were designed to simplify privacy settings for its 350 million users, and to give users more control over who sees their personal information.
But many critics took issue with the fact that the new privacy settings made some personal information viewable to “Everybody” by default, instead of just their circle of Facebook friends, unless a user specifically opted to retain their “Old” settings. And information like a Facebook user’s gender and home city were treated as public information under the new privacy policy.
