Demand Your dotRights Campaign

Facebook is making a distinction between what's "visible" and what's "accessible." After people complained, they gave back the ability to hide your friends list on your public profile. However, they are saying this is just a "visibility" setting, and that it doesn't affect the fact that your friends list is still accessible to applications and ... See Morepossibly to third party websites.
See for example the top of this blog post: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=197943902130
They say: "Now when you uncheck the "Show my friends on my profile" option in the Friends box on your profile, your Friend List won't appear on your profile regardless of whether people are viewing it while logged into Facebook or logged out. This information is still publicly available, however, and can be accessed by applications."
Very confusing, I agree, and a distinction a lot of people are going to miss.

You're right. That's unacceptable. A solution would be if Facebook included a setting that allowed us to opt out of appearing in our Friends' list as viewed by others, but still allowed us to appear in their privately viewed lists to allow them to manage their lists (e.g. add a friend to a particular list they've created.) It's the right thing to do. The current system discourages those who want privacy from having friends—exactly the opposite of what's in Facebook's best interest.

Sadly we can't "make" Facebook do anything, but we can certainly encourage them: If you haven't yet, please sign our _new_ petition asking Facebook to give you better control over your personal information: https://secure.aclu.org/site/SPageNavigator/CN_Facebook_Privacy_Petition

Yes, a nice Facebook privacy policy is great, but how useful is it when all our private data is still transferred in plain text across the internet, avalaible for everyone to intercept?

I realize the danger of being rude, but the idea that our privacy is now protected is nonsensical.

Adequate privacy protection requires SSL encryption of all communications with Facebook!... See More
For a start.

WE, not fb, need to be able to decide what information is public and what isn't.

I think my latest issue of MacLife has just this information, how to manage what individuals on our Friends List see - unless that is what FB took away this week ... the article describes a multi-step process, but it sounds like what you are trying to do.

The new privacy settings are doublespeak.

Sherry, I couldn't agree more. They've spread them over several different pages and provide only fragments of the info on each. To really get a picture of what you can and cannot control, you have to read many different posts. And then they change the feature and post about the change but don't bother to update the old posts, so people are still reading them and getting false information.

It would so easy for FB to present the information in a table format rather than a wordy paragraph format. The table could show a column for old permissions, a column for the corresponding new permissions, a column for the the specific type of data each permission affects (e.g. status updates, friends list), a column for settings options for each permission, and a column that tells what each setting means in terms of who can see it and under what conditions.

How hard could that be? I'd do it myself if I were sure I had a perfect understanding of the new permissions. I have a good understanding, but I can't be sure it's 100% complete, and I don't want to disseminate inaccurate information.... See More

I think FB doesn't publish such a chart because then users would be equipped to protect their privacy, defeating FB's whole purpose in introducing the new settings, which is to expose your name and information to as many people as possible, potentially increasing your number of friends and giving advertisers a field day.

We'll be adding a section to our resource page on this, but you are right that the wording is unclear. As long as it works like it did before, unchecking the boxes should mean that the information is *not* shared with applications your friends run.

Thank you!

RT @CNN http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/12/10/facebook.privacy/index.html

one should be able to control their privacy to the fullest on a social network or any web app ... things you post as a joke can cost you a job, your house, your family, your 'freedom', your future ... but because they don't well there's a market for help

This is good! We need everything we can get now to keep our privacy intact!