Calling the revamped privacy settings by Facebook "a mixed bag," Kevin Bankston, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Attorney, said that while many of the Wednesday-announced changes will be good for privacy, some important privacy controls should have been retained.

With the changes having taken effect Wednesday onwards, the nearly 350 million users of the social networking site will receive post-log-in prompts for reviewing and updating their privacy settings. For users who overlook the prompts, Facebook will automatically default privacy settings to an "everyone" mode, whereby the information shared on the site will be accessible by every user in the network.

Commenting on the changes, Bankston said: "These new 'privacy' changes are clearly intended to push Facebook users to publicly share even more information than before. Even worse, the changes will actually reduce the amount of control that users have over some of their personal data."

However, noting that the privacy changes essentially aim at giving the users direct control over the information they share and with whom, Facebook executives have asserted that changes actually empower the users to have greater control over their privacy.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook had said in a last week company blog post that the changes would not only do away with regional networks completely, but also give the users "the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content they create or upload."