The EU privacy watchdog has criticised social networking site Facebook over its changes late last year to its privacy settings, claiming they are "unacceptable".

The Article 29 Working Party said: "it is unacceptable that the company fundamentally changed the default settings on its social-networking platform to the detriment of a user."

It alleges that the changes made to default settings on Facebook in December last year and the site's recent announcement that it would allow business partners to make more use of members' data, are wrong.

The watchdog says: "The Working Party emphasised the need for a default setting in which access to the profile information and information about the connections of a user is limited to self-selected contacts.

"Any further access, such as by search engines, should be an explicit choice of the user."

On Thursday Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg met with other executives and employees to discuss privacy practices.

Facebook issued a statement saying: "We don’t share specifics around internal meetings, but we had a productive discussion about the latest product announcements and how we can work on providing the best experiences for users and developers."

The networking site continued: "We feel that Facebook has been in the forefront of all kinds of sites, not just social networking sites, in giving our users granular controls which enable each user to customise many individual settings in order to share, or protect, as much information as they feel comfortable with.

"We already enable users to exclude themselves from being indexed by search engines, and recently introduced granular data permissions for applications. We are happy to continue working with The Article 29 Working Party.”

The Information Commissioner's office said that "It is important that individuals carefully consider who may access their information before posting it online".

A spokesperson for the Information Commissioner’s Office said: "We recommend a conservative approach to default privacy settings.

"Social networking sites such as Facebook should ensure that privacy settings are easy to understand and to use.

"Individuals using such sites should fully appreciate the degree of choice that they have about what will happen to their personal information and who will have access to it."

Facebook users can get more information on the privacy policy at http://www.facebook.com/privacy/explanation.php