The December-9 introduced Facebook privacy redesign, which was essentially aimed at making it more competitive with micro-blogging site Twitter, has already generated some harsh criticism from users.

The social networking site is being lambasted for the change whereby the users’ automatic default privacy settings are tuned to the “everyone” mode, which explicitly implies that users end up sharing personal data at the ‘most open level possible’!

Beginning from Wednesday onwards, users logging into the Facebook site received a prompt that request them to review and update their privacy settings, with their options for sharing their profile and status updates being “friends,” “friends of friends” or “everyone,” which also is the default setting in case no option is selected by the user.

Though Facebook apparently introduced the privacy changes to allow users direct control over ‘what’ information they share and ‘with whom,’ its move to set “everyone” as default setting actually means that information shared on the site can potentially be accessed by ‘everyone’ on the Internet.

Commenting on the Facebook’s newly-introduced privacy and security changes, Kevin Bankston, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), said in a blog post: “Although sold as ‘privacy revamp,’ Facebook’s new changes are obviously intended to get people to open up even more of their Facebook data to the public.”