Here’s a short list of the scummy things Facebook has just done with the new “privacy” update:

1) “Everyone” now means “the entire web”, not just Facebook users.

2) Thus, when making a status update, setting it visible to “everyone” – which is DEFAULT, unless you changed it – now means “the entire web”.

3) Facebook now considers your profile picture, current city, friends list, gender, and fan pages you’ve subscribed to “publicly available information”.  YOU CAN NO LONGER CONTROL WHO SEES THIS INFORMATION.  If you think this isn’t a big deal, you are very naive and dead wrong.  If you allow people to search for you on Facebook, any random person can now find you and discover all of your interests.   A stalker can look you up and find what city you’ve moved to.  Or, perhaps you subscribed to the fan page of a controversial issue that you might not want co-workers to see; they can now.

4) Since Facebook apps have access to all of this newly attainable “publicly available information”, this means that any scumbag developer out there can now harvest all of this information, which is really handy for things such as identity theft.  This includes apps that YOU do not use, but your friends do.  I cannot reiterate this point enough.  ANY app that is added by ANY of your friends now has access to your name, profile picture, current city, friends list, gender, and fan pages you’ve subscribed to, AND YOU HAVE NO CONTROL OVER THIS.

If you’d like to find out precisely what apps can see about your friends – even people that have never used said apps – have a look at this quiz provided by the ACLU.  If you’re not worried about the ACLU harvesting your information, that is.

Here are a few links where this is discussed:

PC World:

“Information set to ‘everyone’ is publicly available information, may be accessed by everyone on the Internet (including people not logged into Facebook), is subject to indexing by third party search engines, may be associated with you outside of Facebook (such as when you visit other sites on the internet), and may be imported and exported by us and others without privacy limitations.

“The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to ‘everyone.’ You can review and change the default settings in your privacy settings. If you delete ‘everyone’ content that you posted on Facebook, we will remove it from your Facebook profile, but have no control over its use outside of Facebook.”

CNN:

Until now, you had the option of restricting much of that information. That option has been removed.The ramifications, as the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation sees them:

“For example, you might want to join the fan page of a controversial issue (like a page that supports or condemns the legalization of gay marriage), and let all your personal friends see this on your profile, but hide it from your officemates, relatives or the public at large.” You cannot do so now.

The foundation says: “These changes are especially worrisome because even something as seemingly innocuous as your list of friends can reveal a great deal about you. In September, for example, an MIT study nicknamed ‘Gaydar’ demonstrated that researchers could accurately predict a Facebook user’s sexual orientation simply by examining the user’s friends list.”

ACLU of Northern California:

Even if your Facebook profile is “private,” when you take a quiz or run any other application on Facebook, that app can access almost everything in your profile: your religion, sexual orientation, political affiliation, pictures, and groups. And these apps may have access to most of the info on your friends’ profiles too—which means if your friend takes a quiz, they could be giving away your personal information, even if you’ve never used an app!

EFF:

Facebook previously offered a solution to users who didn’t want their info being shared with app developers over the Facebook Platform every time a one of their friends added an app: users could select a privacy option telling Facebook to “not share any information about me through the Facebook API.” That option has disappeared, and now apps can get all of your “publicly available information” whenever a friend of yours adds an app.

Facebook defends this change by arguing that very few users actually ever selected that option — in the same breath that they talk about how complicated and hard to find the previous privacy settings were. Rather than eliminating the option, Facebook should have made it more prominent and done a better job of publicizing it. Instead, the company has sent a clear message: if you don’t want to share your personal data with hundreds or even thousands of nameless, faceless Facebook app developers — some of whom are obviously far from honest — then you shouldn’t use Facebook.

I demand that Facebook gives us the ability to control what we consider to be “publicly available information”.  If they don’t do this, I’m closing my account.

That probably seems obvious to most, but since it seemingly wasn’t explicitly mentioned anywhere, I conducted an experiment (thanks Mike!) and thought I should mention the results in case anyone else out there wondered about this.