Despite the fact that the widespread privacy-related criticism directed at Facebook forced the increasingly popular social networking site to announce a few changes to its contentious privacy policy, the issue actually highlights the dissimilar ways in which Facebook and its users view privacy.

That user’s wishes and their privacy is not the bottom line for Facebook while making privacy decisions became evident from the social network’s April-announced automatic enrollment of users into the new features like Instant Personalization – which handed the publicly available Facebook data of the users to certain third-party Websites that users visited.

Though the Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had said in January that the privacy changes will basically “reflect what the current social norms are,” the policy of unauthorized sharing of users’ information marked the move of a largely private system, shared only with approved friends, to a mostly public system whereby data was to be freely handed over to search engines and marketing companies.

Meanwhile, whether Facebook is a blessing or a curse is a topic of debate by itself too – while Facebook aficionados opine that the site is an ideal place for express oneself and sharing opinions, photos and event invitations; critics assert the chief abuse that can be associated with the site is that it can also be alarmingly addictive.