The convenience of no longer having to type in profile information on multiple Web sites may be valuable to users, but at what risk to users' privacy? The popular social-networking site said the new feature will let a user connect a Facebook account with a Web site, using a trusted authentication process.

As the user moves around the Web, privacy settings will follow so the user's information and privacy settings are up to date, according to Facebook. Already the company said it will roll out the service to Discovery.com, Digg and Hulu in the next few weeks.

When Facebook first announced the new feature, company officials said they would work with identity providers to develop the best policies and standards to protect information.

The key with Facebook Connect is the disclosure of user data to third parties, according to Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). "Facebook needs to put in place clear privacy rules that limit the disclosure of user data," Rotenberg said. "Only information that is necessary for authentication should be made available."

"There should also be transparency obligations so that Facebook users know the information that is being disclosed and how it is being used," he added.

Getting it Right

"Facebook has run into trouble with similar arrangements in the past when data became available to advertisers and then to application developers ," Rotenberg said. "Facebook needs to do a better job as it considers the disclosure of user ID to third parties."

Rotenberg referred to Beacon, an ad-based service Facebook rolled out last year. The company announced last November that 44 Web sites had signed on to allow users to share information across sites.

Beacon received a lot of flak from privacy advocates because advertisers leveraged users' profile information to send targeted ads. Groups including the Center for Digital Democracy blasted Facebook for collecting information from non-Facebook users and questioned what Facebook would do with the information it was collecting.

Users signed a petition against the feature. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, agreed the feature was a bad idea and offered his apologies. The feature was scrapped.

Some implementations include Citysearch, CBS The Insider, Howcast, Govit, CNN The Forum and Red Bull, according to Dave Morin, Facebook's senior platform manager. Additional Facebook Connect links will go live soon, he said.

OpenID

Facebook's new feature is similar to that of OpenID and other open-source features developed by Internet giants Google, MySpace and Yahoo.

OpenID is not proprietary and is free, unlike Facebook Connect, which was developed with proprietary technology.

Today it's estimated there are more than 160 million OpenID-enabled URLs with nearly 10,000 sites supporting OpenID log-ins, according to the OpenID Foundation.