Another week, another Facebook controversy — this time, over the site’s just-relaunched "Groups" feature, which lets you create instant private or public spaces for your friends, co-workers, fellow hobbyists, you name it.

Personally, I think the idea behind the new Groups feature is an excellent one. By designating smaller circles of friends within your overall list of Facebook pals (which, for some online social butterflies, can easily run into the thousands), you can post updates, photos, videos, and URLs to your individual subsets without bothering everyone on Facebook with the minutiae of, say, your breakfast menu, or how quickly you crossed the finish line in your latest half-marathon.

Indeed, I might start actually posting to Facebook again now that I’ve created a tiny group of friends (three, to be exact) who (a) I trust, and (b) won’t be annoyed by any pointless musings that I'll be tacking onto our wall. (Uh, guys — you don’t mind, right?)

But it didn’t take long for a controversy to flare up: namely, the fact that your Facebook friends can add you to any group they so choose — as long as they’re already members of said group — without your permission.

Why did Facebook make Groups go the "opt-out" rather than "opt-in" way? "To make the product simple" is the official line. Another likely reason for the policy, I’m guesssing, is that it encourages the rapid growth of ... well, new groups. Without the necessity of waiting for invitees to accept an invite, Facebook’s groups are free to grow quickly and exponentially. The more — and bigger — groups there are, the more Facebook members will use them — and that’ll make groups more attractive to app developers and advertisers. Hey, that’s business, like it or not.

Of course, the downside is that you might find yourself suddenly signed up into a Facebook group (or groups) you hadn’t bargained for, such as the "Underwater Basket-weavers of America," with your inbox suddenly flooded with email notifications for each and every snapshot, comment, and update posted to the collective group wall.

That’s a side-effect I’d count as more of an annoyance than anything else, although there’s always the more worrisome possibility that one of your frenemies will add you to a group of a more, ah, unsavory nature.

So, here are five questions — and answers — for how to weather the current Facebook Groups storm (or tempest in a teapot, depending on how you look at it).

1. Who can add me to a Facebook group?
Not just anyone can add you to a group — in fact, only someone who’s already one of your Facebook friends can do so. Still, it’s a bit disturbing that any of your Facebook friends can add you to, say, the "Bald Eagle Hunters Club" without getting your permission.

Then again, your friend would already have to be a "BEHC" member before he or she could invite you to the group ... and besides, who is this so-called friend, anyway? Indeed, the story that sparked this whole debate about the Groups feature involves someone with more than 4,000 Facebook friends. I don’t think I’ve even met 4,000 people in my 41 years on Planet Earth, much less know 4,000 people whom I’d be willing to "friend" on Facebook.

Suggestion: If you’re seriously worried about people adding you to groups that you’d rather not be a member of, maybe it’s time to pare down your Facebook friends list, starting with anyone who added you to a group you didn’t want to be a member of. The "Remove from Friends" button can be, in fact, your friend.

2. How do I leave a group — and prevent someone from adding me again?
Wait — so, you didn’t want to be a member of the "Underwater Basket-weavers of America"? Just visit the group page, click on the "Leave Group" link under the list of members, and you’re outta there — simple. After that, no one will be able to re-add you to the group in question without your explicit permission.

3. But even if I remove myself from a group, won’t the fact that I got added in the first place pop up in my Facebook news feed, for all to see?
Yep, you’re right. You can always delete the notification from your wall, but that won’t stop your Facebook friends or other users (depending on your privacy settings) from seeing the update before you were able to delete it.

One proactive (if extreme) measure, is to deny the Groups app permission to publish stories to your wall; just click on Account on the top-right of the Facebook interface, then select Application Settings. Find the Groups app, click Edit Settings, then click the "Additional Permissions" tab (almost there), and, finally, uncheck the box that reads "publish content to my wall."

4. How do I cut down on all these email notifications from my groups?
Getting inundated with a flood of email messages every time someone posts a "Cute photo!" comment onto a group snapshot can quickly grow tiresome. If you’d like to keep your inbox as uncluttered as possible, just tweak your Groups notification settings: Visit the specific group page, click the "Edit Settings button" in the upper-left-hand corner of the page, and select the radio button next to the option you prefer (for example, you can get a notification each and every time a member posts or comments, only when a friend posts, or only when someone comments on one of your posts). You can also visit the email notification page in your privacy settings and turn off all notifications if you wish.

5. Can the other members in my new group see all my Facebook info?
So, the worst has happened: Your now ex-friend just added you to the "Bald Eagle Hunters Club," and all of a sudden you’re unwillingly mingling with a bunch of ... well, people you wouldn’t normally invite over for tea. Since you’re in a group with these guys, do they now have access to all your Facebook info?

Here’s the good news: not if you’ve limited access to your profile in Facebook’s privacy settings. If you’ve restricted your updates, photos, and personal data to "friends only," your fellow "Bald Eagle" members won’t be able to see anything about you except your publicly accessible profile info (which, again, you can customize in your privacy settings).

On the other hand, if your privacy settings allow anyone and everyone to see your Facebook info, other, non-friend members in your new Group will be able see your data too — then again, they already could, even before you (unwittingly or not) joined the group.

Bonus: What can I do to ensure my privacy is completely secure in a group — or on Facebook in general?
You probably already know all this, but it bears repeating in light of the new Groups controversy: Facebook isn’t about keeping your personal info safe. It’s a (for-profit) business that does everything it can to get people to share their personal information. That’s not an excuse, it’s just a fact.

If you’re really worried about your privacy on Facebook, please — don’t post your personal details, photos, videos, street addresses, or phone numbers on Facebook. Seriously! It might even be time to delete your account, or just don’t join at all. Trust me, you’ll still be able to make friends in the real world.

But if you still want to be on Facebook, you’ll have to accept the fact that you’re putting your personal information in Facebook’s hands. Don’t trust Facebook — or your friends on Facebook, for that matter? Then maybe Facebook isn’t for you.

DHAKA: Bangladesh has blocked social networking site Facebook for posting caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed (Peace be upon him) and "obnoxious" images of the Muslim-majority country's leaders, an official said Sunday.

Facebook was blocked late Saturday, the Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Commission said.

The move was ordered after the website "hurt the religious sentiments of the country's majority Muslim population" by publishing caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed (Peace be upon him), BTRC acting chairman Hasan Mahmud Delwar said.

"Some links in the site also contained obnoxious images of our leaders including the father of the nation Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, current Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and the leader of the opposition," he said.

Bangladesh's elite anti-crime Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) has arrested one young man over the images attacking the political leaders.

"A special intelligence team of the RAB arrested him and he has been charged with spreading malice and insulting the country's leaders," senior RAB official Enamul Kabir said.

Delwar said the authorities "cannot tolerate these offensive images" of Prophet Mohammed (Peace be upon him) and the political leaders, but he stressed the ban was "temporary".

"Facebook will be re-opened once we erase the pages that contain the obnoxious images," he said.

On Friday thousands of Bangladeshis took to the streets of the capital Dhaka, demanding that the government ban Facebook over what they called "anti-Islamic propaganda".

The protests were in response to an "Everyone Draw Mohammed Day" campaign on Facebook which sparked angry protests and a ban on the site in Pakistan.

"Drawing caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, is an attack on Islam and is extremely humiliating for Islam," protest organiser A.T.M. Hemayet Uddin told thousands of cheering, white-clad supporters.

The controversy over Facebook's privacy policy is helping those developing alternatives to the social network.

Funding and users are flowing to services that claim to put members in charge of their personal data.

The rivals range from start-ups to more established firms working on the specifications for an ecosystem of open social networks.

Experts say Facebook may have little to worry about, despite 11,000 people pledging to quit Facebook on 31 May.

"Nobody has reached anything like critical mass in the same social platform area," said Lee Bryant, from social technology consultancy Headshift.

"Facebook is like an entire web operating system," he said.

Old rivals

There are already many well-established alternatives to Facebook.

Fans of the microblogging service Twitter might argue that it is poised to steal the site's crown. It entered the world's top 100 websites only last year, and is now sitting around tenth position globally, according to Alexa, a web information company.

But Twitter is more a micro-blogging site than a social network, where friends follow each other's daily activities by default.

Alongside are a whole host of other early high profile innovators in social networking.

But many, including Bebo, Friendster and Myspace have seen their popularity decline in the last 24 months. None of these are still in Alexa's global top 20.

The Diaspora team hopes to change social networking Young upstarts

The latest round of privacy issues with Facebook has provoked considerable interest in some more embryonic social network projects.

Mr Bryant said: "Many people are looking to Diaspora as a new model - something which is standards-based, open-source and distributed."

Diaspora was founded in early May year by four New York University students who aim to create "the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open-source social network".

It also caught the eye of investors on the Kickstarter website, which aims to find funding for creative projects. In just a few weeks, the Diaspora team has received pledges of $175,000 (£122,000). They started out asking for just $10,000.

Max Salzberg, one of the founders, told BBC News: "Facebook is not what we are going after.

"We are going after the idea there are all these centralised services where people are giving up their personal information. We want to put users back in control of what they share."

But Diaspora's software is still in the early stages of development, and it's not yet clear exactly where the project might go.

Another fledgling social network is OneSocialWeb that has the backing of mobile giant Vodafone.

Its designer, Alard Weisscher, told BBC News "We believe social networking is becoming so important ... that users should have the right to choose their provider, be able to switch between providers ... whilst owning and being in full control of their data."

Common standards

Mr Weisscher said that rather than try to create a new social network, the OneSocialWeb team is trying to define a common language, called protocols, for communication between social networks.

This is an idea common to many such projects.

Michael Chisari founded Appleseed in 2004, to try and build a simple social network. The question he pondered at the time was "If two sites were running my software, why couldn't they interact?"

Like Diaspora, Appleseed's approach is one of a growing band of "distributed social networking" projects, where anybody can set up a social network, and the different systems should be able to interact with each other.

Mr Chisari said: "I compare it to the 1990's, when AOL and CompuServe (early Internet Service Providers) were both very popular, but were 'walled gardens'".

"Users on AOL could only e-mail other AOL users, same with CompuServe. Then, e-mail started getting popular and some people switched, but it forced people to ask why they were being walled off," he said.

Mr Chisari pointed out that both AOL and Compuserve "were forced to open up ... so that their users could participate with the rest of the world."

Both companies have since faded considerably, and Mr Bryant at Headshift thinks something similar might happen at Facebook: "It's a real and present danger. What people are looking for as a sign of that is a flocking behaviour.

"It was a flocking behaviour that built Facebook, and it's a flock of people saying they're going to a different social network that could lead to its decline."

Competing standards

So can the new social networks establish a set of standards that they all stick to?

Mr Bryant said it is a sensible goal in the long term. "But over the short term, it will be a real battle."

The founder of Appleseed has discussed universal standards with OneSocialWeb, because the software he developed has some similarities to their social networking language.

But well-funded Diaspora has indicated that it might use its cash pile to implement a different set of open standards called OStatus.

Those are being developed in part by yet another potential rival to Facebook.

That company is called StatusNet, which itself has created social networking software in use by 25,000 sites, with more than 1.5 million user accounts, according to Evan Prodromou, the company's head.

"Any StatusNet site lets people from other (OStatus standards-compliant) sites follow the users there", he said.

"The open protocols that we use mean our software works with much higher-profile services, like Google Buzz, Posterous, LiveJournal, WordPress, and Tumblr."

Is there any chance that Facebook might sign up to such an open model as well, just as AOL and Compuserve did with E-mail?

Mr Bryant from Headshift thinks not: "The valuations we've seen for rounds of investment in Facebook mean they have to focus on making money soon.

"If they go down the open standards route, they would lose much of the lock-in that gives them value," he said.

Closed meeting

And any such move would also assume that a common, open language can be established in the first place.

According to Mr Prodromou from StatusNet, a "federated social web summit" is planned in July to try and build momentum for one around OStatus standards.