Members of the controlyour.info (CYI) group claimed on Tuesday to have seized control of nearly 300 Facebook community groups in an effort to draw attention to questions concerning online privacy awareness.

The activists discovered that many groups on Facebook were left without an administrator, after a Google search. Then they joined 289 open groups and made theirselves administrators. Once they were administrators theyr owned the groups and could have changed any setting. However, they chose to change the picture, the name and the description of every group.

"Our intention was and is to restore these groups to their original form and find a suitable admin among the members. To be able to do this, we first backed up all the data we wanted to replace," the FYI members wrote in a blog post.

"If you chose to express yourself on the Internet, make sure the expressions are your own and not a spammers. This isn't some kind of scare tactic, nor is it a hack, it's a feature that can be used, and is being used, in bad ways."

The FYI members admitted that they had broken the terms of service, as defined in the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities of Facebook"You will not provide any false personal information on Facebook, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission".

"We created fictive accounts for one reason: we wanted to put focus on our message rather than our persons. It also eased the process of joining and administrating this large number of groups," the activists added.