LOS ANGELES, Nov. 16 (Xinhua) -- The growing popularity of social network website Facebook has sparked equally large concerns over privacy, especially on its new messaging system.

Facebook Messages, a system designed to handle the convergence of different kinds of messages -- e-mail, instant messaging, SMS and Facebook messages -- and bring them together under one social umbrella, was unveiled Tuesday.

Facebook Messages has provided users with the ability to have their own facebook.com e-mail address, but the system will also work with other e-mail systems, including Google's Gmail and Yahoo mail.

However, Facebook's introduction of the new system was followed soon after by concern over privacy.

"The more Facebook puts itself in a position to receive, store and safeguard the most private communications we have, the more Facebook will need to be vigilant to protect privacy and guard against hacking and data theft," Augie Ray, an analyst with market research firm Forrester, was quoted by Computer World as saying.

"When Facebook was primarily about open communications, such as status updates, this threat wasn't as great. But now that Facebook is increasingly facilitating private communications through features like Groups, Places and Messaging, it requires Facebook to do more to protect that data," the analyst said.

"And if Facebook fails to keep users' messages private, the backlash against the network could be damaging, and failure to do so can result in substantial loss of trust with Facebook and could cause consumers to abandon all or parts of Facebook," he said.

Facebook has been under attack over the security issues. Even members of the U.S. Congress have raised the issue.

According to Computer World, two U.S. Congressional members last month questioned the privacy of Facebook's most popular applications. Facebook had just admitted that applications made for the social network, such as FarmVille, Texas HoldEm Poker and FrontierVille, have been sending users' personal information to dozens of advertising and Internet-monitoring companies.

Facebook also has been criticized for its move to share user information with third-party websites, due to the difficulty of following its privacy controls.

Rob Enderle, an analyst with the Enderle Group, was quoted by Computer World as saying, "It's no surprise that some people will be hesitant to entrust Facebook with the bulk of their electronic messages."

Charlene Li, an analyst with Forrester, wrote on www.marketingvox.com that Facebook provided an elegant way to consolidate everything in one place, and that also meant Facebook ended up being the beneficiary of capturing all of those interactions. The irony was that the ability of Facebook Messages to integrate and unify the messages meant it would also track everything that people shared with each other, she said.

Li wrote that Facebook already very effectively mined profile data to better place ads, but limited the data used to what the user already entered on their profiles. But she envisions a future in which Facebook could understand when people are asking for advice, and if they acted on it -- thus mapping influence.

"While Facebook has no plans to do this in the future, privacy advocates are standing at the ready to understand how that data will be used," she wrote.

Melanie Attia, product marketing manager for Campaigner, told MarketingVOX that, right now, the Facebook messaging system was bare. "You can't embed HTML for instance and we don't know if we will be able to," she said.

What was known was that users would be able to see statistics such as opens and click throughs and would also be able to gain a better understanding of how people were using Facebook, she said.

With Facebook valuing conversations between individuals, marketers would be able to leverage those conversations, track the interactions and hopefully step into the conversations when relevant to the brand, she said.

However, some others defended Facebook and other social networking websites.

A report by the Washington Post says the Facebook and Google issues have both been called "breaches." But they're not. The information at stake in each case was already public by any meaningful definition. It would have remained public no matter how good or evil the two companies had been.

In Facebook's case, the paper said, the data consisted of the basic parameters of people's accounts: name, picture, gender and networks, all of which Facebook already made public to all of the 500-million-plus users on the site. Unless you changed its default settings or you were younger than 18, that information was also visible to anybody online.

Facebook's own rules prohibit applications from using these data for their own purposes, and the Palo Alto, California company has since cracked down on application developers and banned one data broker