Facebook privacy tweaks 'unacceptable', says EU

European data protection advisers have said it was "unacceptable" for Facebook to make some of its users' data public without their permission at the end of last year.

In a Wednesday letter to the company, the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party said social networks needed to have a default setting in which access to profile information and information about users' connections were "limited to self-selected contacts". The working party advises the European Commission on data protection issues.

"Any further access, such as by search engines, should be an explicit choice of the user," the working party said in a statement. According to the statement, the letter to Facebook said "it is unacceptable that the company fundamentally changed the default settings on its social-networking platform to the detriment of a user".

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