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Fifteen seclusion and consumer protection organizations including the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Center with respect to Digital Democracy, the Consumer Federation of America, and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group Wednesday filed a lamentation with the Federal Trade Commission and sent a letter to Congress that charges Facebook with engaging in unfair and deceptive trade practices in violation of consumer shelter law.”Facebook continues to manipulate the settings of users and its confess privacy policy so that it can take personal information provided through users for a limited purpose and make it widely available despite a commercial purpose,” said the complaint letter to Congress. “In reality, this complaint also speaks to a growing concern about the parts of the FTC to protect American consumers as new business practices appear. “The move came on the same day that Facebook temporarily close down its chat feature after finding a security hole that enabled users lo friends’ private instant messages.

This latest salvo against Facebook’s secrecy procedures claims that changes to user profile information and the posterior disclosure of user data to other parties without users’ consent “constuprate user expectations, diminish user privacy, and contradict Facebook’s own representations,” related Marc Rotenberg, executive director of complainant Electronic Privacy Information Center, in a specification.

The complaint asks the FTC to scrutinize Facebook’s privacy processes and to method the social networking site to better protect users’ information and communications in expectation of security breaches. In part, the move came about because of Facebook’s newly come rollout of a feature that lets users tell members of their netting about products and Web sites they like.

“Facebook now discloses corporal information to the public that Facebook users previously restricted,” according to EPIC. In April, Senators Charles Schumer, Michael Bennet, Mark Begich, and Al Franken wrote to Facebook, voicing their concerns not far from “recent changes to the Facebook privacy policy and the use of exterior data by third-party Web sites. ” The impetus behind the verbal expression: Facebook’s announced plan to disclose user data to Web sites destitute of obtaining account holders’ permission.

“Previously, users had the ability to fix upon what information they chose to share and what information they wanted to stay private,” Schumer said in a statement.InformationWeek has published an in-midst report on staying FISMA compliant and secure. Download the report here (registration required).