AllFacebook.com reported yesterday that Facebook has called an "all hands meeting" for today, May 13th, at 4:00 PM Pacific time, to specifically discuss Facebook's strategy for users' privacy following widening and intensifying pressure from government, users and media. Specifically, a New York Times reader Q&A with Elliot Schrage, Facebook's Vice President for Public Policy, left many users worried about the state of their Facebook information - and worried about Facebook's plans for the future.

Although it isn't certain what is going to be discussed or announced during today's meeting, industry insiders think it may represent major changes in Facebook's recent privacy decisions, including perhaps temporarily disabling the new Instant Personalization feature. Privacy advocates have been complaining about Facebook's data-sharing features for years, but the recently launched Instant Personalization, an opt-out feature which let Facebook share your private data with selected companies, may have been the straw that broke the camel's back.

If the new instant personalization feature isn't disabled outright, it will more than likely be changed from "opt-out," which means that all users are automatically set to use the new feature unless they say otherwise (in two different parts of the privacy settings), to "opt-in," which means that the feature is disabled by default and users will have to choose to enable it if they want to use it. Opt-in features and services almost invariably have a lower usage than opt-out features, although experts say that the opt-in usage is a more valid indicator of a feature's popularity.

Facebook isn't the only social network feeling the pain of privacy woes. Google's recently launched Buzz social platform was beset by privacy problems from the very first day, stemming from Google's decision to push the new feature to all users and to automatically add frequent email correspondants to the publicly-visible list of Buzz followers, effectively exposing users' email address books. After a series of privacy revisions, Google finally pulled a total "privacy reset," forcing users to reconfirm their privacy settings before using the Buzz service.

Facebook would be wise to do the same. Their privacy policy is almost as circuitous as the privacy settings within Facebook itself, which span dozens of pages with hundreds of options. Facebook has been accused repeatedly, most recently by the US Congress, of designing intentionally confusing privacy settings and recommending weak privacy defaults to users in order to increase their revenues through the sharing of public user data.

This isn't the first time that Facebook's been caught with its privacy pants down following the launch of a new feature. Facebook's Beacon feature, which effectively exposed users' purchases around the web in users' public streams, was so universally railed upon that after several weak attempts at privacy redesigns, Facebook simply pulled the feature altogether and issued a rare public apology to users.

It's unsure whether we'll be seeing the same sort of reaction in this case. One thing is for certain, though - as of 4PM PST today, Facebook is definitely going to have a thing or two to say about users' privacy.