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A German minister has sharply criticized Facebook's handling of personal data and is calling on the social network to upgrade its privacy settings. Consumer protection minister Ilse Aigner urges Facebook's CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg in an open letter "to revise the privacy policy without delay." In the letter provided Monday to The Associated Press, Aigner refers to Facebook's planned changes to its privacy settings and calls on the company not to allow personal data to be passed on to third parties for commercial purposes without users' consent. She says "private information must remain private" and adds that "Facebook does not respect this wish."

Imagine visiting a website and finding that it already knows who you are, where you live, how old you are and who your Facebook friends are, without your ever having given it permission to access that information. If you're logged in to Facebook and visit some as yet unnamed "pre-approved" sites around the web, those sites may soon have default access to data about your Facebook account and friends, the company announced today . Barry Schnitt, Senior Manager, Corporate Communications and Public Policy at Facebook, told us in an email that "the right way to think about this is not like a new experience but as making the [Facebook] Connect experience even better and more seamless." There will be new user controls made available, but this is a new experience: this makes Facebook Connect opt-out instead of opt-in. The proposed change was first written about by Jason Kincaid on TechCrunch, who called it Facebook's Plan To Automatically Share Your D...