Facebook and its privacy settings are the talk around town these days. Are there really any serious privacy concerns? Is it media hype? Will the advantages of the information sharing make up for the loss of privacy? Opinion seems to be hugely divided.

But before we get to that, there is another interesting launch from the social networking giant – Facebook credits. These allow users to earn credits via their credit card, paypal, card reward programs or even trading in unwanted gift cards. The credits can then be used for various third party offers be they gifts or virtual goods in games and applications.

Who’s suffering – the third party application and game developers who are suddenly having the rules change overnight. Till now, they have been selecting their own offer networks for these services. Now they need to use Facebook partners Trialpay and Peanut Lab. Plus, and this is most important, the revenue share has now been hiked up to 30-40% of gross revenues.

All of this is a huge issue for the game and application developers out there but I’d like to focus on another element of Facebook credits.

And that is the security of all the financial details that the user shares. As of now the website says ‘Facebook protects your financial information with state-of-the-art security features. Your information is stored on a secured server behind a firewall, and the transaction is encrypted. Facebook never shares your financial information with anyone.’

Hmmm....isn’t that what they said right at the beginning. But suddenly I found my contacts, my photos and all the rest of the information that I had on Facebook - to be shared only with my network - visible to all. Did I get a message from the Company telling me about their system changes – No. Did the company educate me about how to go back to the previous settings – No.

Frankly, as far as I am concerned, this is a huge issue. (Think Blippy and Swipely and sharing of financial information - http://bit.ly/ayLEZV)

Now, let’s look at an average user, someone not very tech-savvy – my mum perhaps, who has just opened a Facebook account to connect with friends and family. Here is a snapshot of the privacy settings they will have to navigate through – and point to be noted, not at the behest of Facebook but only when enlightened by someone else that they should look at the personal information they are sharing involuntarily with the world.

Whew....!!!

..and a piece of trivia that I loved – Facebook’s privacy policy is currently longer than the US constitution.

A snapshot of the growth of the policy

Source: The New York Times

What interesting times we live in.