Despite being greatly hyped as a secure and more privacy-friendly alternative to Facebook, the open-source project called Diaspora – which recently released a pre-Alpha version of its source code – is already being panned by the early users due to security issues.

The early criticism does not come as much of a surprise, given the fact that, in announcing the alpha release of the code on the open-source hosting site GitHub, the Diaspora team – comprising four New York University students - had cautioned that the code release could have some security holes.

Noting that the code is essentially designed to spur development activity around the platform, and that the release would not necessarily be bug-free, the Diaspora team had mentioned: “We know there are security holes and bugs, and your data is not yet fully exportable.”

However, even with the admonition already in place by the Diaspora developers, early reviewers have largely been unsparing in their criticism of Diaspora’s evident lack of security features.

While The Register’s Dan Goodin is of the opinion that Diaspora is “littered with landmines”; a Hacker News commenter said that the code is “a combination of Rails Security 101 errors.”

Furthermore, CloudFab’s CEO Steve Klabnik said in his blog Hackety Hack: “Basically, the code is really, really bad. I don't mean to rain on anyone's parade, but there are really, really bad security holes” in the alpha code released by Diaspora.