Privacy Alert: Facebook Wants Access To Your Financial Information

(CNN Money) Someday soon, Facebook users may pay their utility bills, balance their checkbooks, and transfer money at the same time they upload vacation photos to the site for friends to see. But Facebook knows people want to keep some things, banking for example, private. And it wants to support those services too.

David Robinson, Facebook's director of global marketing solutions, U.S. financial services, asked a crowded room of bankers at a Securities Industries and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) seminar in New York late last month.

"There are certain things, whether it's financial services, or banking where I don't necessarily want my friends to know exactly what I'm doing,  right?" Facebook is quietly planning just such an offering with Australia's Commonwealth Bank. Currently in an internal beta, with the first version built in March, the application is expected to launch sometime this year to customers. It will allow Facebook users who are bank customers to make payments to third parties as well as Facebook friends through the social media channel, according to the bank. Read The Rest Of The Story