Nine in ten Facebook users do not favour new 'mandatory' Timeline feature

Nearly nine in ten people have not supported Facebook's plans to make its new 'Timeline' feature mandatory, according to a survey.

The social network's new feature, which was announced in late 2011, displays their entire history of a person on the site-from status updates to photos.

The idea is to create an online scrap book telling a user's virtual "life story", at least back to 2004 when the site was founded.

It means Timeline, which will soon be made compulsory, can expose people's embarrassing photos and status updates.

According to The Telegraph, a survey of 4,000 Facebook users by the security firm Sophos found that only eight per cent of those polled, said that they liked the change.

Fifty-one per cent of respondents said they were "worried" by the new format while another eight per cent said they would "get used to it".

Critics claimed that the change could erode users' privacy, but Facebook says that it will not make anything publicly available which is not already viewable.

"Timeline does not change any of your existing privacy settings. There will be an 'activity log' which will allow people to apply a extra privacy settings to each post," the paper quoted a Facebook spokesperson, as saying.

According to the report, users will be notified in the next few weeks and will be given seven days to go through their profiles deleting anything they do not want to be visible on their timeline.