Editor's Note: The controversy over Facebook's aggressive attempts to cash in on information about its members is heating up. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that "anti-Facebook sentiment is surfacing in highly visible places, from the halls of Congress to the blogs and podcasts of influential technology experts like Leo Laporte of Petaluma."It seems to me that ultimately their goal is to funnel all Internet traffic through Facebook.com," said Laporte, who deleted his Facebook profile during a recent podcast and donated money to Diaspora, a project to create a more open and private alternative to Facebook. Laporte was inspired to put an end to his Facebook account by a recent blog post by Jason Calacanis, chief executive officer of Mahalo, a question-and-answer Web site. He accused Facebook and CEO Mark Zuckerberg of trading users' privacy for profit. ... Facebook convened a staff meeting Thursday to discuss the backlash, although some staff members described it as a routine gathering. ...

"Earlier this month, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and 14 other privacy and consumer organizations filed a complaint against Facebook with the Federal Trade Commission, accusing the popular social network of "unfair and deceptive trade practices" and violating users' expectations of privacy and consumer protection laws. And last month, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., asked the FTC to develop guidelines instructing social networks on how private information can be used. All of this comes in the wake of the company's launch of a new "open" social platform designed to bring Facebook features, such as its Like button, to other Web sites, and an experimental Instant Personalization feature that gives certain Web sites the ability to access a member's name, profile picture, sex and network of friends. The company also launched community pages that made topics in a member's profile more public."

Erik Hayden's article below from Miller-McCune explores the results of a new study that suggest that privacy on Facebook is probably impossible:

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On Facebook, You Are Who You Know

Remember the golden days when Facebook used to be for just college students? It was a quainter site — with a much different set of rules.

Drunken party photos used to be unceremoniously splayed out in public, privacy settings were almost nonexistent, wall posts weren’t status updates and there was little need to filter regrettably off-color comments. After all, the only people (you assumed) who saw that stuff were college buddies who were also posting the same incriminating photos of themselves on the site.

Now, after the Facebook explosion, users are more aware of privacy issues than ever before and the new rule of thumb has become “curb public access to your profile as best you can.”

New research suggests that this is nearly impossible.

In a study conducted by Alan Mislove of Northeastern University and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, researchers tested an algorithm that could accurately infer the personal attributes of Facebook users by simply looking at their friend lists. The research culled profile information from two detailed social-network data sets: one from a sample of almost 4,000 students and alumni on Facebook at Rice University and another from more than 63,000 users in the New Orleans regional network.

Researchers developed an algorithm to see if they could accurately infer attributes like high school or college, department of study, hometown, graduation year and even dormitory by dissecting these users’ friend lists. The study cut to the core of the debate surrounding the social-networking site: Is your personal profile your own or, to paraphrase anti-Facebook crusader Leif Harmsen, is it the site’s profile about you?