No privacy: Your indiscreet Facebook updates are now public

The search engine Openbook scans all "public" updates left by members of the social networking site, making them available to anyone through internet.

The software has been created to highlight Facebook's complex privacy settings, which have been blamed for confusing users into disclosing personal information more than they intend.

Searching Openbook for potentially compromising terms like "sex", "boss" or "drunk" throws up thousands of updates from the past few hours, The Telegraph reported.

The content searched by Openbook is already in the public domain, but the privacy campaigners hope that presenting details in a searchable format on a single site will make social network members think twice before sharing any information.

Last month Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook co-founder, announced that the site's privacy settings would be simplified after growing complaints that users were being duped into sharing private information.

He admitted that the site "missed the mark" on allowing its almost 500 million users to easily control how much of their data could be seen by the public.

Openbook is the brainchild of Will Moffat, Peter Burns and James Home, three website developers from San Francisco.