Facebook, a social networking site primarily focused at college students, was this week the center of a storm of privacy-related protests when it updated the main page of the site a user sees when they login.  Previously, the default page just gave you notices on people that wanted to add you as a friend, sent you a note or who "poked" you, just a little way to get another user's attention.  On Monday, the page was changed to show a news feed of sorts that would detail any changes your friends had made to their profiles.  For example, you can now, from your Facebook homepage, find out if Mary Jo broke up with her boyfriend, of if your frat brother George posted pictures of last weekend's kegger.

This change has raised numerous concerns over the privacy of data on the social networking site.  The company is now being accused of making stalking via the site much easier.  Since the update came on Monday, more than 500,000 of Facebook's users had signed an online petition calling for the removal of the new "news feed".  Concerns are primarily over non-friends being able to see too much information about a user.

Mark Zuckerberg, creator of the site, has tried to calm things down by restating the fact that what is available via the news feed is the same information users had available to them before, only now they don't have to click around looking for it.  Facebook allows users to specify exactly what information on their profile is available publicly, and what information isn't.  Most profiles on the site are set to only be viewable to other users they've added as friends themselves.

The change to the site comes amid heightened user awareness of data security and privacy online as data theft has been a major focus of the media as laptops containing personal information such as medical records and social security numbers have been stolen recently.