MEMBERS OF THE TECH ELITE HAVE LOGGED OUT OF FACEBOOK FOR GOOD!

Herds of nerds - and plenty of regular folks - are fleeing Facebook.
Concerns about eroding privacy on the beloved social networking site - buoyed by word that Facebook staff held an "all hands" summit about security on Thursday - have prompted members of the tech elite to logout for good.

"It doesn't feel like Facebook is on the side of its users," said Peter Rojas, a well-known blogger who created Web sites like Gizmodo and gdgt.com. "They're playing fast and loose with privacy settings."

Rojas isn't alone in jumping ship from Facebook, which has more than 400 million users. Matt Cutts, head of the Web spam team at Google, also decamped, as did Cory Doctorow, co-editor of the popular blog BoingBoing.

In a Twitter post, Doctorow Friday blamed a slew of recent privacy changes - and Facebook CEO Marc Zuckerberg - for his decision to flee.

"Never made use of Facebook, but privacy awfulness from Zuckerberg has prompted me to delete acct," he wrote.

Casual users are also looking for an out - "delete Facebook account" was among the top 20 trending searches on Google Friday morning.

When Facebook went public in 2005, default privacy settings kept personal information out of the hands of people who were not users' "friends" on the Web site.

Now, default settings have swung the other way, putting more of users information out there for the whole world to see.

Beyond the concern of personal privacy landing in the wrong hands, data on Facebook profile is now being shared with "partner sites" like Yelp, Microsoft, Pandora and more.

Those companies can use profile information to target advertising, as well as to understand what demographics are using or talking about their products.

Facebook staff, apparently recognizing the groundswell of discontent, held a summit Thursday to discuss privacy concerns.

"We don't share specifics around internal meetings, but we had a productive discussion about the latest product announcements and how we can work on providing the best experiences for users and developers," Andrew Noyes, a spokesman for the company, told ABC News.

Later that day, though, the Web site announced a new feature to ramp up security on handheld devices.

For his part, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement, "The privacy and security of our users' information is of paramount importance to us."