Facebook poised to roll out new privacy settings

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Facebook, the world’s most popular social-networking site, is preparing to roll out new privacy settings Wednesday amid increasingly heated debate over how it handles the personal data of its nearly 500-million users.

A Facebook spokesman declined to provide further details.

Last month, the Palo Alto, Calif., company caused an uproar among privacy watchdogs and lawmakers when it began giving information about users, including friends, jobs and interests to third-party websites without getting users’ explicit consent.

A small number of Facebook users revolted, saying the site had broken its social contract by not giving them easy, straightforward ways to limit what information is shared and with whom.

Facebook could risk some regulatory exposure. U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) has asked the Federal Trade Commission to formulate privacy rules for social-networking sites.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg responded in an op-ed article in the Washington Post on Monday that Facebook would make privacy controls simpler to use and third-party sharing simpler to turn off.

Those steps fall short of demands from critics who want Facebook to seek users’ permission and give users full control over how their personal information is disclosed and used.

“The devil is in the defaults,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

-- Jessica Guynn