Facebook is an online means of communicating with friends and acquaintances. It a pioneer of social networking that has grown to become a corporate tool as well.

Now that the honeymoon period is over, Facebook has started getting some more critical attention. Just yesterday, three US senators held a press conference to raise the possibility of legislating to get Facebook to change its privacy policy and to provide better protection of its users' personal information.

The senators called on Facebook to revise its decision last week to share user information with third-party websites. The senators have also asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to set privacy guidelines for sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.

In brief, Facebook currently allows you to set your own privacy walls depending on whether you provide access to friends, friends of friends or everyone. You can also control what basic profile information about yourself is visible to others as a means of connecting with friends: name, profile picture, gender, and connections with others on the site. I note that Facebook's Privacy Policy page was revised on April 22, but it does not say what was changed.

Last week, Facebook announced it was launching two new features that some think erode privacy protections. Both are probably Facebook's way of trying to make money for the site by connecting with the business world.

First, there is the "Like" button, which can be placed on blogs and news sites across the web. Click the button on an external website and you authorise Facebook to publish the fact that you visited that link on your Facebook and which, in turn, will also be published to your friends' news feeds.

When your friends visit the external site, they will also be informed that you've visited that site.

Not bad as a means of extending social networking, but it is no coincidence that one of the announcements on the official Facebook blog users the Levi's site as an example of how it would work.

"For example, if I like a pair of jeans on Levis.com, my action will be shared with my friends on Facebook, where they can comment on it. I can also see which of my friends like the jeans on Levis.com," explains a Facebook product manager. "In other cases, I may want to create a more lasting connection to something, such as a book, band or movie. So, if I like the movie "The Godfather" on IMDb, it will be added to my profile as an interest on my "Info" tab. Once the connection is made, "The Godfather" page can send me updates through News Feed, and it will appear in search results."

Or if I like a certain chocolate bar I can get the corporate feed! One can hear the tills ringing up the bucks.

The second part to founder Mark Zuckerberg's announcement was an "instant personalisation" feature. Without adjusting your privacy settings, when you sign into another partner site your publicly available personal information from Facebook will be transferred to that site. Currently Facebook is working with Microsoft Docs, Yelp and Pandora, so check out those sites to see how this would work on a larger scale.

"For example, now if you're logged into Facebook and go to Pandora for the first time, it can immediately start playing songs from bands you've liked across the web," says Zuckerberg. "And as you're playing music, it can show you friends who also like the same songs as you, and then you can click to see other music they like."

Hmmm. I suppose it is about how you control those signals to others that you were there. On Zuckerberg's Facebook blog announcement, about 2,000 people indicated they were happy with the new features, while about 600 said they were not.

"We think that the future of the web will be filled with personalised experiences," says Zuckerberg. How far companies like Facebook can take that personalisation is the issue. Probably these two features are legitimate reasons for lawmakers to step in and determine how far social networking sites, or any site for that matter, can go in sharing personal information without an explicit choice being made by the user, each and every time it is shared.

To have you say on the matter go to the Facebook blog (http://blog.facebook.com) and participate in the PricewaterhouseCoopers 2011 State of Information Security Survey (www.kadquest.com/gissf2010). The eight annual survey is done to understand how executives and industry leaders view current and future challenges facing the information security industry.

The results from the survey, which will be published in CIO magazine and CSO magazine, are meant to help organisations benchmark their current performance against peer companies.

As an incentive, each respondent will receive a copy of the survey summary report.

Send any comments to elamin.ahmed@gmail.com