The Press Complaints Commission was today discussing privacy issues surrounding social networking.

Representatives from legal, media, online and political fields were to debate how information is taken from sites like Facebook and Bebo and used by third parties.

The PCC commissioned a survey into these sites which showed 78 per cent of the adult online population would change information they publish about themselves if they thought it would later be reproduced in the mainstream media.

PCC chairman Sir Christopher Meyer said: "Social networking marks a huge cultural change in the way in which people communicate.

"Personal information is being put into the public domain on an unprecedented scale.

"There is a need for public awareness about what can happen to information once it is voluntarily put into the public domain.

"This clearly has implications for the PCC which has always had the task of deciding where to draw the boundaries between what newspapers and magazines may legitimately publish and what can rightly be considered private.

"The challenge remains the same for online editorial content including material taken from social networking sites.

"I expect our current Code of Practice to be able to handle complaints in this area and in the process to enable the Commission to define through its decisions the boundary between the private and the public."

Other findings from the survey showed that 89 per cent of web users think there should be clear guidelines about the type of personal information that can be published online so that they can complain if this material is wrong or intrusive.

Forty-two per cent of web users aged 16-24 know someone who has been embarrassed by information uploaded to the internet without their consent.

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