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Facebook announced late on Tuesday night that it has adopted its new proposed privacy policy which offers new privacy options that grant users better control over their personal data.

The social networking website which has over 350 million members is asking its users to review their privacy settings for all their content posted on Facebook when they login.

Facebook site states that the reason for this update is that they seek to empower users by giving them improved control over their data, but many people think that there is an ulterior motive. One of these skeptics is Brad Stone of the New York Times who states that the revisions also provide an opportunity for Facebook to fix faulty or outdated services that may be holding it back in the social networking market against rivals such as Twitter.

In a press release, Elliot Schrage (Facebook's Vice President of Communications, Public Policy and Marketing) stated: "Facebook is transforming the world's ability to control its information online by empowering more than 350 million people to personalize the audience for each piece of content they share.

"We've always designed Facebook to enable people to control what information they share with whom—it's the reason our service continues to attract such a broad and diverse group of users from around the world. We're proud of the latest evolution we're announcing today and we will continue to innovate to serve users' changing needs."

Since this update was launched on Tuesday 9th December digital rights groups and bloggers have heaped heavy criticism on Facebook’s changes.

Critics said the changes were not welcomed by Facebook users and that they "nudged" users towards sharing their personal data with the world wide web and to allow them to be found via search engines.

"Facebook is nudging the settings toward the 'disclose everything' position," said Marc Rotenberg, director of EPIC (the US Electronic Privacy Information Center). "That's not fair from the privacy perspective." EPIC said it was now analysing the updates to see if they were considered deceptive.

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