If you've logged into Facebook over the last few days, you were likely welcomed with this pop-up window alerting you to new changes to the site's privacy control settings. (And if you haven't been, you will be shortly.)

These changes weren't unexpected. Facebook announced their plans in July and a couple of weeks ago they posted a heads up that the changes were coming soon. Now they're here and Facebook has posted information on its blog about them, as well as a video tutorial (which I haven't checked out, so don't know how helpful it is).

Now, when you were presented with this notice, you had one chance to skip it but, after that, you were forced to go through a few steps to acknowledge the changes (and modify them). So you've probably already done this, but I'm going to go through the process here in case you weren't completely sure what you just did.

The first screen you'll see is one that lists a number of areas where Facebook recommends what your privacy settings should be but also lets you change them back to what your previous settings were.

I was a little confused—and annoyed—by this screen for a number of reasons. First, the list is such a tiny subset of all the things you can control, I wasn't sure what this meant for those other settings (more on those later). Second, I couldn't really see any logic to why they were suggesting the different settings. Third, I couldn't remember what my old settings were although I discovered if I rolled over one of the categories, a tooltip popped up telling me what it was.

Of course, that didn't really help when the old setting was exactly the same with what was being recommended, but I can imagine it would have been difficult to customize the screen for all 350 million users, so I could live with that.

One of the things I didn't like was seeing that they're still lumping status updates and links together—I was hoping they'd separate them out finally. I don't know about other people, but I want to restrict my status updates to just my friends, whereas I'm fine having a broader group of people see links I post to other sites.

The bigger reason I was annoyed was because, if I didn't make any changes and clicked Save, they would have assigned new settings to some of my areas, even though all along they've been saying they would keep your existing settings by default. Instead, they're forcing you to change back to what you've already said you wanted, which is like using an opt-out subscription form instead of an opt-in one.

However, at least you do have the option of changing those back. And if you didn't do it at the time, you can go back into your Privacy settings at any time and make sure they all represent what you want.

Once you click Save Settings, you're presented with a screen summarizing what you just agreed to, and so ends the process of updating your settings.

Where It Gets Ugly

During this process, in a few places you'll see this note—in small print:

When you visit a Facebook-enhanced application, it will be able to access your publicly available information, which includes Name, Profile Photo, Gender, Current City, Networks, Friend List, and Pages. This information is considered visible to Everyone.

Basically it's saying that when you sign up for any of Facebook's third-party applications, like Farmville, Lexulous, Visual Bookshelf, etc., the developer of that application now has access to all of the information listed. I think this list is way too expansive. Of all of the items, I think only Name should really be essential (and there's probably even an argument where an anonymous ID would be fine for some cases). But why do they need to know your gender or where you live or who your friends are or what pages you're a fan of?

The answer, of course, is so they can find ways to target advertising to you. And maybe most people are fine with that. But it should be the user's choice—not Facebook's. And it's not even an opt-out scenario. You have no choice in the matter whatsoever.

And even though this note starts talking about Facebook-related applications, it actually says all that information is available to Everyone, which means it could show up anywhere on the Internet. I haven't fully digested what all the implications of this are, but I know it goes against my definition of "control," something Facebook keeps insisting they're giving us more of.

So where's the Good in all of this? Well, they have added some additional controls that I think will be useful and I'll be writing about those tomorrow.

In the meantime, again, I suggest you go into your Privacy Settings (through the Settings link at the top of the page) and click through all the screens to make sure you're not sharing information you didn't intend to.

Having said all that, I also want to reiterate my guiding principle when it comes to privacy and any online site:

If you don't want someone to know something about you, don't put it on the Internet!

Posted in Facebook, How To, Privacy/Security, Social Media