In a follow-up to our previous coverage of Facebook’s current privacy issues, including George Bronk’s hack past users’ secret questions by using publicly posted information, Facebook-related apps are once more in the center of attention. The social-network announced last Friday a minor change of settings that grants third party apps to access users’ addresses and phone numbers via the standard permissions dialogue.

Fox News cites a security expert on the matter:

“You have to ask yourself,” Sophos senior technology consultant Graham Cluey said in the post, “is Facebook putting the safety of its 500+ million users as a top priority with this move?”

Facebook counters that the move is intend to maximize convenience for its hundreds of millions of users, who increasingly want notifications of activity on the social network while on the go.”

FarmVille is probably not at the very epicenter of attention, though Zynga’s apps have been involved in recent Facebook privacy issues, facing lawsuits from users of the giant social network.  But apps from less trusted origins accessing users’ addresses and phone numbers are raising security concerns. These in turn were addressed by Appitalism.com, an eShop and social network hybrid which provides customers a 10-million digital media items catalog to choose from. The site, which also supports mobile devices, making the same point as Cluey did above.

“This is a major change for users, and many won’t realize that they have given permission for their phone numbers to be gathered. With 600 million members, Facebook needs to err on the side of caution. This type of information is sensitive, and it is almost guaranteed that a lot of users will be unhappy about its disclosure.”

Nonetheless, there are others still taking action, notably the German government.  The European officials, which have also been watching Google and its privacy routines, are taking certain Facebook privacy matters into its own hands.  They’ve recently commissioned a piece of software dubbed X-pire that erases photos from Facebook, Picasa, Flickr, MySpace and other sites after a certain amount of time. An annual subscription to X-pire is available for about $32.