Facebook is once again in the headlines after more privacy - or lack thereof - scares, along with news that EPIC has filed a complaint with the US Federal Trade Commission over what they describe as "unfair and deceptive trade practices" that Facebook has been taking part in.

The suit is mainly to do with the site making certain information public that users didn't specifically specify. This includes the fact that recently all Facebook users were automatically - that is, without any form of user interaction - made "fans" of anything that they previously suggested they had an interest in. The FTC has responded quite harshly to this particular complaint saying, "These changes violate user expectations, diminish user privacy, and contradict Facebook's own representations", which doesn't bode well for the social networking site.

Facebook also suffered a major blow to their quickly sinking privacy reputation this week, as users found that by exploiting a simple flaw in the website's chat program, that they were able to view the conversations of their friends and even those that they had previously only requested as friends. While the company was quick to act on this, it seriously angered many users of the site who already feel big brother is in the air when it comes to Facebook

While you'd imagine that with scares such as this, that the social network would be quick to denounce any claims that they are attempting to push users into a more open format of information sharing (read: less privacy), they are in-fact doing the opposite. Founder Mark Zuckerberg has been repeatedly quoted as hailing the death of online privacy and ushering in a new age of transparency among our fellow net users. He was most famously quoted at the Crunchie awards in San Francisco earlier this year stating, "People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people” and that, "That social norm is just something that has evolved over time."