Facebook privacy settings are great. Just a few minutes of tweaking allows you to create complex rules that makes sharing on Facebook easy AND safe.

Or so we thought.

I’ll start by prefacing this with two recent developments. The first is that Facebook is now one of Americas most trusted companies, and the second that around 65 million users are now accessing Facebook from mobile devices. It’s these two factors that make the following so concerning.

Have a look at the privacy settings below:

These settings allow friends to see wall posts with the exception of the “Employees” group. This group has specifically been removed rights to see wall posts. Or so the setting says…

This setting is does not work correctly and does NOT work at hiding any wall posts made from Facebook mobile (including the Facebook iPhone app). This bug is a massive privacy concern.

A friend of the above account in the “Employees” group could not only see wall posts from mobile devices, but also post to the wall, clearly against the privacy settings that were in effect. Wall posts from non-mobile devices were not visible.

The following screenshot shows a wall viewed from an account which has been added to the ‘Employees’ group with the privacy settings as above.

We have no way of proving we haven’t ‘shopped the screenshots above but feel free to try the settings with a friend to prove it to yourself. We also hope the previous hole we uncovered should give some credibility to our claims.

So there you have it. If you have your boss hidden from seeing wall posts, you’d better stop your friends posting on your wall from their phones…

On a side note, the privacy setting does work for status updates made from mobile devices. For concerns about your social networking posts showing up on search engine results, you may want to look into a service like Reputation.com which can help clean up your personal image

Facebook have recently added a new easter egg in Facebook Chat with a brand new penguin emoticon:

You can use this emoticon with the following combination: <(“)

We’re unsure of the reason for penguin love at Facebook, but they also had an unbranded free penguin gift back in July.

For more, check out our full guide of Facebook Chat features.

1) Sync Facebook Events with your calendar program

Every event page features an export link. It’s an easy way to quickly add Facebook events to your favorite scheduling program, such as Google Calendar, Apple iCal or Microsoft Outlook.

However, it’s a bit of a pain to have to continually do this for every event. Fortunately, Facebook provides an iCalendar URL for all your upcoming events that updates automatically.

Simply click the “Export Events” link on the top of the Events page, and copy the URL that follows into your favourite iCalendar supporting program.

2) View who joined Facebook because of you

It’s not only possible to view whom you’ve sent Facebook invitations to, but also who joined because of you. So if you invited your friends Steve Jones and Isaac Dabah, simply head on over to the Invite History page of Facebook.

It seems after all the warnings from Facebook that once you choose a username for your profile you’re stuck with it forever, Facebook have now quietly added the ability for you to change it.

Ever copied a Facebook link from your address bar and pasted it to someone? If you have, there’s a possibility you also sent that person a snippet of your Facebook browsing history. In this article, FBHive explains how and why this happens, and what can be done to prevent it.

Facebook uses AJAX technology to allow users to navigate around the site without having to reload every page. This creates a more streamlined user experience, allows Facebook Chat to work more smoothly and, I suspect, reduces the server load for Facebook. There is however, one major flaw with the way Facebook implements this system.