Washington DC, Dec 18 (THAINDIAN NEWS) Many privacy groups have complained about the latest Facebook privacy settings to FTC. One of them is The Electronic Privacy Information Centre. It has asked the FTC to look into the changes Facebook has made to its users’ privacy settings and to force Facebook to restore its old privacy safeguards. With the Electronic Privacy Information Centre, there are other groups also who are complaining and they are, American Library Association, the Consumer Federation of America and the Center for Digital Democracy.

The recent changes, which came under fire from, the privacy groups, include treating users’ names, profile photo, friends list, gender and other data as publicly available information. The complaint says the changes diminish user privacy by disclosing personal information to the public that was previously restricted.

However in its defense, Facebook is saying that it discussed the changes with regulators, including the FTC, before making them and that it is disappointed “that EPIC has chosen to share their concerns with the FTC while refusing to talk to us about them.”

And surprisingly this is not the first time that Facebook is under fire for something like this, because earlier this year the Canada’s privacy commissioner accused the social network of disclosing personal information about users to the hundreds of thousands of outside developers worldwide who create Facebook applications. In August, Facebook agreed to give users more control over such sharing.

The FTC confirmed that it has indeed received the complaint about Facebook’s privacy settings, but had no other comment on the matter at all.