YNOT – In response to growing complaints about privacy issues on Facebook, the company has decided to end region-wide networking on the popular social networking site. That means you will no longer be able to set your profile as viewable to anyone in a specific “region,” such as the city where you live or grew up, the school you went to, or the company where you work.”As Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members, and we’ve concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy,” wrote Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook. “Almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us. If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information.”

The company will also be adding new privacy controls that allow members to designate custom access settings for each piece of content that they post on Facebook. So in other words, now the teenager whose mother insisted that he friend her can post pictures of him and his girlfriend down by the lake without letting mom see it – and without taking the drastic step of kicking mom off the friends list.

Some critics have argued that the move by Facebook goes too far, since users who took the time to educate themselves on Facebook’s privacy settings always had the option to restrict access to their profiles.

“If Facebook users became more acquainted with the power they have to protect themselves, perhaps sweeping shut-downs such as these wouldn’t be necessary,” wrote Brennan Slattery for PC World. “But as Facebook locks doors and tosses keys, I cannot help but feel it’s headed in the opposite direction from whence it started, dismantling its very purpose, and adopting an attitude of exclusivity.”

Blogger Ryan Tate of Valleywag wrote that the entire move might be less about privacy, and more about pushing Facebook users to open up.

“That, we admit, is just our shameless, cynical speculation,” wrote Tate. “Facebook wants people to share their content with everyone, like on rival hot-startup Twitter, but most people are content just sharing with their regional networks. So why not kill the regionals and push users to share with the world by default?”

A full text of Zuckerberg’s open letter to the Facebook community can be found on the Facebook blog.