There's been a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission, after all, as True/Slant's Kashmir Hill has written. Facebook altered its Privacy Policy to strip protections from data like friends lists and profile pictures. But it turns out you're not allowed to do that by fiat, you need to explicitly get permission from users, something Facebook's "transition tool" failed to do, even as it allowed users to keep other types of data private. Writes Hill, a sometime legal blogger:

In 2004, Gateway did something similar, changing its privacy policy to make it okay to sell information it had gathered for Hooked On Phonics users to third parties. It got into trouble for that. It had to revert to its old privacy policy, and pay a fine. (A little one, just $4,000.)

And then there are the private lawsuits. They're inevitable, right? Facebook is already on the hook for $9.5 million it agreed to pay to settle a class-action suit over its Beacon advertising system. The lawyer who prosecuted that case is busily milking this new legal field; he's now suing Netflix for upwards of $2.5 billion for allegedly violating its privacy policy.

Facebook's last payment of $9.5 million is not a huge dent in a company that will make more than $500 million this year. It looks like the next payout one should be bigger — or it's just a cost of doing business (as usual).

1. Hide group and page memberships

Facebook changed its formal Privacy Policy to say that "pages you are a fan of... and networks" are now totally public information (along with many other things). There's apparently no setting to shield page and network data, which leads to terrible situation like this one, sent in as a reader plea:

All of a sudden my grandmother can see that I belong to the Queer Graduate Student Union and Open Relationships Networking Group. Please help. I can't bring myself to de-friend my grandmother!

UPDATE Dec. 17: We're not sure if this is new, but this can now be changed by going, confusingly, to "Application Settings." Go to the "Settings" menu at the top right of your profile page, then select "Application Settings," then scroll down to "Groups" and select "Edit settings." Set to "Only me" (click to enlarge):

Thanks to the tipster who walked us through this. Sadly, even as one privacy mystery was resolved, we were made aware of another. See below.

2. Block Facebook activity from appearing on your wall

There used to be a setting that allowed users to prevent Facebook activity from automatically showing up on their Facebook wall, thus blocking updates like "John commented on Jane's picture," "John is now friends with Bob," "John is attending Uber Gay Circuit Party 2010," etc. This setting is apparently gone, and you have to remove such notices one at a time.

Writes one tipster:

It is extremely annoying not to mention a complete tell of how often I use Facebook during work hours:)

3. Prevent strangers from friending you

It used to be you could keep non-friends from sending you a Facebook friend requests, although they could confirm. That's not the most, well, social way to use a social network, but judging from our email, it was a frequently used and valued feature. Wrote one Gawker regular:

Before the changes I wasn't searchable on FB and hence friended only those I wanted to friend, in essence, I would initiate the request. But... I am now getting friend requests from people I don't know, or worse, from people I know but I don't want to befriend on FB...

Facebook now makes you offer the "Add friend" option to all friends of friends — you can't restrict any tighter than that, so strangers can still send you friend requests. Screenshot (click to enlarge):

4. Completely hide friends list

Your friends list, too, is considered public information. Though you can remove it from your profile, you can't keep friends of friends from seeing it. They just have to pull up one of your friends' friend list, click you name, and view your friends list.

Writes one reader: "Many of us are concerned, seeing as how there are thousands of people faced with the threat of stalkers." Another, right on cue:

I have been dealing with a deranged, threatening stalker... There is no way of keeping your Friend list private... I have been obsessively reading about this topic [overall Facebook privacy]... To say I'm outraged is an understatement.

We thought Facebook might be improving this, but we continue to receive emails like these, and Facebooks written Privacy Policy still states that friends lists are now public information.

5. Block Wall announcements that you've been tagged in a photo

You can keep photos of yourself out of the "Photos" tab on your profile, even if they've been uploaded by other people. But it seems you can't block from your Wall announcements that you've been tagged in someone else's photo , which sort of defeats the purpose: It leaves your profile as a very convenient central location for any incriminating pictures of yourself.

You can remove each notification manually, but that becomes a game of whack-a-mole.

Wrote one Facebooker:

I've already blocked everyone from viewing photos that I'm tagged in, but I'd prefer that my friends not even see that I've been tagged in the small preview photo that gets posted to my wall every time someone tags me.

UPDATE: According to a helpful tipster, this can be disabled by going to the Settings menu at the top right of your Facebook home page, then to "Application Settings," then the "Photos" application, then click "Edit settings." Then click the "Additional Permissions tab," and there is an option to "Publish to streams." Uncheck this. Like so (click to enlarge):

UPDATE: 6. Profile photo

While it's possible to restrict your profile photo album, your main profile photo is one of the pieces of personal data that was forcibly made public by Facebook when it updated its formal Privacy Policy. The best you can do is upload a fake pic, or remove your profile photo entirely; there's no way to have a profile photo that only your friends see.

And more, we're sure

We'd love to be wrong about any of these privacy rollbacks, so if you know of settings or workarounds we've overlooked, do email us at tips@gawker.com. Conversely, if we've left out a lost privacy option you feel strongly about, let us know about that, too.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (pictured) originally said his social network's privacy changes were intended simplify and enhance the privacy experience on the site. Judging from our inbox, it would seem he's achieved neither.

Past coverage:
The Valleywag Guide to Restoring Your Privacy on Facebook, Dec. 15
Facebook's Great Betrayal, Dec. 14
Facebook CEO's Private Photos Exposed by the New 'Open' Facebook, Dec. 11

The investment firm, Russia's Digital Sky Technologies, led a broader group of investors in putting money into San Francisco-based Zynga, according to the New York Times. It's DST's second Silicon Valley conquest, following two investments in Facebook earlier this year that totaled $300 million and that allowed the social network to cash out employee equity.

Usmanov (pictured), who reportedly owns 32 percent of DST, comes with the sort of unsavory press clippings worthy of a long-survivng oligarch in anarchic, organized-crime-ridden Russia: He's been accused by a former British ambassador of being a "gangster and racketeer" and of close ties to mafia drug trafficking and, as we've reported previously, controversially tried to censor bloggers who linked to news of the accusations.

Then there was this, last year: After Usmanov bought a chunk of mobile phone operator Megafon through a holding company and from a fund called IPOC, a former Megafon shareholder said he had been physically coerced into selling his Megafon holdings to IPOC; he later disappeared from his bloodstained vacation home in Latvia.

Zynga is used to dealing in the dark fringes of the markets; it made loads of ad revenue off scammers who deceptively sold "learning CD" and SMS subscriptions to gamers trying to earn virtual currency and now faces a class action lawsuit. Now, despite all the company's talk about reforming its way back into the light, it is, in a way, going deeper into the shadows. Zynga CEO Mark Pincus once bragged about "doing every horrible thing just to get revenues right away." Let's hope, for his sake, he's not making such a recklessly calculated move now.

The social network says in the "Warning" dialog (below) that it was simply responding to complaints from users who reported the content to be objectionable. Hmm, we're curious who those users would be, and who they work for.

In any case, the ban, to whatever extent there was one, seems to have been lifted, at least judging from our own ad-hoc test just now.



In the meantime, we've just updated the original post with an important new privacy tip and some clarifications on two of our existing ones. Enjoy, and feel free to share — while you still can (cue ominous music).

UPDATE: Another tipster informs us that one or more of our Facebook articles were temporarily blocked from being posted within this Facebook group on the privacy changes.

(Top pic by pshab on Flickr)

Ideally, we'd all be allowed to just accept Facebook's recommended settings. But the social network is defaulting most people to share their private content widely with strangers, in an obvious bid to grow traffic and to compete more directly with Twitter. Then there's the content the company is trying to take from you and make entirely public.

And, to borrow a phrase, what can't be attributed to Facebook's greed can be chalked up to ineptitude. Highly complex privacy schemes are bound to fail, as others have written, because most users don't have the patience to sit and learn intricate details of various options. That would seemingly include Facebook co-founder Zuckerberg, who initially accepted the default options, according to published reports. But he soon altered these defaults to make them more private, hiding his photos from friends of friends.

And now it's emerged in True/Slant that the CEO has also roped off his friends list and events calendar from strangers he has no friends in common with. (At least, he's removed them from his profile page; Facebook's official Privacy Policy still states that all friends lists are irrevocably public, and it's not clear whether that's been changed.)

If the CEO of Facebook is changing his default privacy settings, shouldn't you? Here are some things you can do (click any image to enlarge):

Hide your photos (as much as possible).

Most people don't seem to realize their old profile photos and albums are available to strangers The profile photos usually default to being shared widely, e.g. to "Everyone," while the photo albums are often only slightly more restricted, e.g. "Friends of Friends."

You can't hide your current profile photos, but you can hide the others that you've uploaded. (UPDATE 1: The wording of this part was updated to make it clear that you can't ever hide your main profile pic. So do, like, a picture of your cat or something. Or a building!)

From your Facebook home page, go to the Settings menu in the upper right corner, and select "Privacy Settings." Then select "Profile Information." Then scroll down to Photo Albums and click "Edit Settings"...

...and adjust to the level of privacy you are comfortable with ("Only Friends" was probably your setup before):

Hide other people's photos of you (partly)

If someone "tags" one of their Facebook photos with your profile, it can show up on your profile. If you don't want strangers (including "Friends of friends") to get to conveniently peruse these often candid shots from your profile, go to Settings/Privacy Settings, then "Profile Information" and adjust "Photos and Videos of me." We'd recommend "Only friends:"

UPDATE 1: To clarify, you can never remove pictures in which you are tagged from other people's accounts, as we implied before. But by removing them from your profile, you make it a lot harder for strangers to find pictures of you that you might not want them to see.

Hide your birthday

It's insane that Facebook recommended that many people share their birthday with "Friends of friends" in its defaults for the new "privacy" scheme. This personal information can be used by financial fraudsters to help impersonate you to your bank, credit card company, email provider and others. We'd recommend showing it to as few people as possible. Or, even better, set it to a false date.

Under Settings/Privacy Settings/Profile Information:

Hide your posts

Facebook is defaulting people to share their posts with "friends of friends," i.e. strangers. You may want to revert this to share only with your friends. Under Settings/Privacy Settings/Profile Information:

Remove your friends list from your profile page

Facebook has updated its privacy policy to say that you can never permanently hide your friends list, and last week it was impossible to hide the list from friends of friends (see Felix Salmon's second update here). This might be changing; on Monday, we couldn't find a way to view the friends list of certain "friends of friends."

In any case, it's definitely possible to make your friends list harder for strangers to view, by removing it from your profile. Go to your Facebook home page, then click on "Profile" in the top right corner to view your profile.

Then scroll down to the section of the profile that shows your friends (titled "Friends"), and click the pencil symbol in the upper left corner. This will reveal a checkbox to hide your friend list from some strangers, at least on your profile page:

UPDATE: We're getting "corrections" on this telling us exactly what we already said above, so we'll repeat it in bold: this does not completely shield your friends list. Friends of friends can reportedly still see it, for example, and as we said above Facebook considers it public information.

Hide your profile from search engines

Facebook is touchy about this one, because it's always displayed some data for search engines, by default, and suddenly people are noticing. That's why when you go to change your settings under Settings/Privacy Settings/Search, Facebook now pops up this ultra-defensive dialog:

What Facebook doesn't tell you is that it now offers a link to "View Such and Such's Friends" from the public, search-engine-indexable profile page. At least, that's what ours does. At the very least, you should look at your search engine page using the preview link under "Public Search Results" and see if you want to continue to make it available:

Hide your info from friends' apps (UPDATE 1)

This is a big one we missed the first time around — by default, your friends can share huge amounts of your personal information with applications they authorize, like quizzes and games. It would be a good idea to restrict this even if Facebook weren't sloppy about policing its apps and partners; as things stand, we'd recommend unsharing most if not all types of data from your friends' apps. (Thanks to the commenter and tipsters who sent this in.)

Go to Settings/Privacy Settings, then "Applications and Websites," then "What your friends can share about you - Edit Settings:"

Did we forget or mis-state something?

Email us and let us know; tips@gakwer.com.

UPDATE: Our other coverage of this topic:

The Facebook Privacy Settings You've Lost Forever, Dec. 16
Facebook's Great Betrayal, Dec. 14
Facebook CEO's Private Photos Exposed by the New 'Open' Facebook, Dec. 11

(Top pic: Zuckerberg, via Getty Images.)

Its new privacy policy have turned the social network inside out: millions of people have signed up because Facebook offers a sense of safety. For the last five years — as long as you're relatively careful about who you accept as your friends — what you do and say on Facebook for the most part stays on Facebook. Katie Couric's daughter first posted pictures of her famous mom dancing silly in 2006, but it took three years for them to leak to us. (Thank you tipsters!) But virtually overnight and without a clear warning, Facebook has completely reversed those user expectations. Their new privacy settings amount to making anything you post on Facebook to be public, unless you go to great lengths to keep your info private.

The most insidious part of Facebook's scheme to expose user data has been how the company framed them, claiming to want to enhance privacy. In an open letter to his 350 million+ users, CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed he believed the old privacy framework was "no longer the best way for you to control your privacy," and that the new system would give people "even more control of their information." It would be "simpler" and finer-grained.

But when the system came out a week later, it actually gave less, not more, control over information. Gone was the ability to hide your friends list, profile pictures, fan pages and network membership from all strangers; Facebook's new, formal privacy policy explicitly made this information public (despite the ability to keep some of it, like the friends list, off your profile page).

Meanwhile, the social network is pushing users hard to share their personal content with strangers. Users are being forced to update their privacy settings, with most default choices set to "Everyone" in the world or "friends of friends."

Facebook's business rationale here is clear. Rival Silicon Valley startup Twitter has grown extremely quickly in the last few years, almost entirely on the back of public content — from celebrities, people's friends and users' professional colleagues. That has brought traffic, money from search engines and a $1 billion valuation.

Facebook wants in on that kind of growth, and more public content means more traffic. But Facebook has historically been one of the most private of the social networks, functioning as a sort of safe alcove amid the chaos of MySpace and Friendster. "Privacy is a big reason Facebook users are so loyal," BusinessWeek's Sarah Lacy wrote in 2006 (via Big Money).

So Facebook needed to give users a big shove to put its business plan into play. As startup founder Jason Calacanis puts it,

Facebook is trying to dupe hundreds of millions of users they've spent years attracting into exposing their data for Facebook's personal gain: pageviews. Yes, Facebook is tricking us into exposing all our items so that those personal items get indexed in search engines–including Facebook's–in order to drive more traffic to Facebook.

But it's not just that Facebook is tricking its users; it's betraying them. It did so when it literally communalized private friend lists that people spent years accumulating, without which their accounts would be useless. It did so when it mislead them by saying it wanted to enhance their privacy, when the real goal was growth and profit. And it continues to do so every day it does not respond to the loud fedback of its users (and the implicit feedback of its own CEO).

And people increasingly know they've been betrayed. This past weekend, journalist Dan Gillmor publicly deleted his Facebook account. Heidi Moore at Slate's Big Money temporarily deactivated her account as a "conscientious objection." And look at the big-name tech journalists weighing in on all the shock and outrage on Facebook critic Calacanis' "Wall" (click to enlarge):

Facebook has been through embarrassing privacy snafus before, like the intrusive "Beacon" advertising system, which the company eventually abandoned. But this one was so pre-meditated, so pre-processed and so condescendingly hyped and spun in advance. It's obvious that Facebook is making a calculation, one that, for users, involved a lot more subtraction than addition. Barring mass defections, the difference will drop straight to Facebook's bottom line.

UPDATE: Our other coverage:
The Facebook Privacy Settings You've Lost Forever, Dec. 16
The Valleywag Guide to Restoring Your Privacy on Facebook, Dec. 15
Facebook CEO's Private Photos Exposed by the New 'Open' Facebook, Dec. 11

(Top pic: Zuckerberg, by Josh Lowensohn)

Take Angelina Jolie, for example: Did you know the sought-after actress has just 27 Facebook friends, and they're almost all A-listers? Talk about a meticulously curated list:

Then there are the surprising affiliations. Will Smith, for example, is a member of the Facebook page "Jesus Daily," which posts bible quotes from Jesus each morning, even though the actor has made repeated donations to groups affiliated with the Church of Scientology; echoes the cult's "spiritual physics" rhetoric; has set up a middle school staffed with Scientologists; and has said Scientology is filled "brilliant and revolutionary" ideas. Smith was raised Baptist and has insisted he takes ideas from multiple religions. A look at his page (click to enlarge):

And you can send direct Facebook messages to a surprising number of celebrities, right from the "Send message" command in the upper left corner of their profiles, though it's not clear to what extent, if any, this has been affected by the new privacy framework, since some celebrities, like Tobey Maguire, still have messaging turned off. Some who have it enabled:

• Angelina Jolie
• Brad Pitt (aka Bradpitt Bp, via Angelina's profile)
  
• Orlando Bloom
  
• Tom Hanks
• Robert DeNiro
  
• Sean Connery
  
• Julia Roberts

More, we're sure, to come.

(Top pic: Jolie, giving an interview to NBC's Matt Lauer in 2008, via INF)

Under Facebook's highly suspicious new "privacy" system, users are typically encouraged to share their photos widely, a move that helps Facebook become more like its fast-growing frenemy Twitter. In what seemed like a savvy PR move, CEO Mark Zuckerberg opened his own photos to the public last night. But after we ran some of the more interesting shots, he appears to have partially yanked them back.

Friends of friends can still see the photos. But one tipster and one Gawker staffer who share no friends in common with the Facebook CEO were able to see his photo cache last night and are no longer able to as of this afternoon; the pictures are definitely now shielded from such strangers. You can check for yourself by clicking here.

It's a dumb move, PR-wise: On the one hand, Facebook' own chief executive is illustrating that his privacy settings are so baffling that even he himself doesn't grasp their full implications. And, on the other, we already published the most embarrassing stuff! Sigh.

We can't think of what else Zuckerberg is trying to shield from public view; maybe it's one of these pictures we haven't run yet, but we doubt it. Oh, and the last two aren't of Zuckerberg, but of two different flacks for the social network, Brandee Barker ("you have a choice") and Barry Schnitt ("Facebook is changing, and so is the world changing and we are going to innovate to meet user requests"). We figure, if they didn't want these candid personal shots published to the world, they would have configured their oh-so-simple privacy settings accordingly.

UPDATE: Zuckerberg has updated his wall with the following message about an hour ago:

For those wondering, I set most of my content to be open so people could see it. I set some of my content to be more private, but I didn't see a need to limit visibility of pics with my friends, family or my teddy bear :)

This is baffling, since most of the strangers who can read this wall messageabout how the CEO "didn't see a need to limit visibility of pics with my... teddy bear" now cannot see said pics, with his teddy bear.

UPDATE 2: Spokesman Schnitt tells True/Slant, "[Zuckerberg] went through the transition tool like other users, evaluated the recommendations, and ended up accepting them."

"Now girls, only the most special ladies at Facebook get this t-shirt with my face on it... remember that it is a sacred honor and if I see so much as a single wine stain on there, you're out of Zuck's Angels for good..."

"Priscilla, I swear to God, I agreed to pose for a picture and a split-second later she was somehow under my arm..."

You might call this "the Twitter shirt," accompanied by the "Twitter money" cheer.

There are thousands and thousands of reasons Brandee Barker loves being Facebook's spokeswoman.

Barry Schnitt, meanwhile, can't even afford a proper t-shirt. On the bright side, he was the only one at his brother's bachelor party in Austin, Texas with a proper cowboy hat (that's Schnitt on the far left). Maybe it was the money he saved by using those company-issued shorts.

So at least this whole privacy scandal hasn't been for naught.

As a result of it, Mark Zuckerberg has gone from sharing very little of his personal Facebook content with the public to sharing a whole lot, True/Slant's Kashmir Hill has noticed. Where the public could see just one photo of the Facebook co-founder in October, strangers now have access to a cache of 290 shots, including snaps uploaded by Zuckerberg and those uploaded by people who have tagged him in their pics.

This opening may be a result of Facebook's new default settings; or could be a result of Zuckerberg trying to reverse the PR debacle of the new privacy system by opening up the content himself; or could be a combination of both. In any case, it springs one way or another from the privacy controversy. And as dogged but often frustrated chroniclers of Zuckerberg's personal side, we're thrilled. We just knew this new system would be a boon to gossips like ourselves.

We've looked at all 290 pics of Zuckerberg, here are our favorites:

UPDATE: Here's some of subsequent coverage on this topic:
The Facebook Privacy Settings You've Lost Forever, Dec. 16
The Valleywag Guide to Restoring Your Privacy on Facebook, Dec. 15
Facebook's Great Betrayal, Dec. 14

Now on to the photos! Click to view:

With girlfriend Priscilla Chan, from her album "moments." Have you seen a sweeter thing, today? Probably not.

Aww, it's a pic Zuckerberg took of Chan from his mobile phone, around the Facebook office. He gave this the caption, "testing mobile photo uploads on [']cilla..." Hopeless romantic, that one.

And here's Zuckerberg testing his "light saber" on 'cilla, if you know what we mean, and we think you do. (We mean an actual toy light saber, for kinky role playing. Priscilla has just informed Zuckerberg that he must "do" Han Solo, while she does Leia.) Pic by Jocelyne Takatsuno.

In fairness, this is the bear that gave Zuckerberg the chutzpah to turn down Yahoo's $1.4 billion offer. Clutch it tight, Mark. From a trip to Lake Tahoe, photographed by Andrew Bosworth, a Facebook software engineer.

Zuckerberg (right circle) with his brothers in Harvard's Alpha Epsilon Pi, a Jewish fraternity, including spurned Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin (left circle). Photo by Sam Gross

"Hmmm, so if we triple the hypothetical revenues in this spreadsheet cell, our valuation goes to....:" Photo by Aaron Sittig, Facebook Design Strategy Lead.

Ain't no party like a Facebook party 'cause a Facebook party don't stop... until that guy licks the chip bowl. Photo by Skip Bronkie

Now we're not saying Zuckerberg is necessarily wasted in this "Lake Tahoe - Opening Night" vacation picture by Facebook engineering/product manager Scott Marlette. But there are an awful lot of "Lake Tahoe - Opening Night" vacation pictures in which one might reach that conclusion, is all we're saying.

Like, for example, this one, another picture that might give the naive observer the impression that Mark Zuckerberg got hammered on this "Opening Night," at Lake Tahoe, with his staff. Also by Scott Marlette. Thanks Scott!

This one also might lead the confused and bewildered to conclude that Mark Zuckerberg got drunk in Lake Tahoe on "Opening Night," pounded the beer in front of him and taunted a co-worker. Picture yet again by Scott Marlette, de-facto Valleywag staff photographer for the greater Lake Tahoe area.

Little known fact: In 2006, when it looked like Facebook's valuation might never reach eleven figures, Zuckerberg briefly considered a career in folk music. From Kevin Colleran's "random pics from my new camera, Aug. 2006."

At sister Randi's wedding last year. Now there's the nice Jewish boy you can bring home to your mother. By Kevin Colleran.

The early days: From the kitchen table at "the first Palo Alto Facebook house." Again by Sittig. Dig the preppy, Anthony Michael Hall look.

Hey hey easy there, it's called Facebook for a reason,photographer and Facebook "Engineer / Manager / Old far" Bob Trahan. OSHA does not recommend that monitors emit this level of radiation.

"And if elected student body president, I promise to restore proper security to the high school yearbook archives... the precious, precious yearbook archives... You're not recording this as video, are you Randi?"

That's because the social network has codified this new state of affairs right there into its written "Privacy Policy." A comparison of the new and old policies reveals this addition:

Certain categories of information such as your name, profile photo, list of friends and pages you are a fan of, gender, geographic region, and networks you belong to are considered publicly available to everyone, including Facebook-enhanced applications, and therefore do not have privacy settings. You can, however, limit the ability of others to find this information through search using your search privacy settings.

Facebook users have just begun to realize this is happening. Reuters' aggressive financial columnist Felix Salmon took note of this exciting new "privacy" feature when his critics on an investor website published a list of his Facebook friends, presumably for hate-mailing. Former Gawker editor Doree Shafrir blogged this morning about how her once-hidden friends, network and fan-page subscriptions have suddenly been published.

I've now set my privacy settings so that only friends can search me [and find out you're a fan of Howard Kurtz! Oy! -Ed.]…which seems sort of counterproductive to the whole enterprise, doesn't it?

Indeed it does, and it's scant protection: Shafrir's friends are still listed to strangers on her profile page, if you can find it. There's a way to turn this off, too, according to Salmon (see update to his column), but anyone who shares a friend with you will still be able to see all your friends (I'm looking at Salmon's now, and we're not friends).

Really, as gossip bloggers, we at Gawker should be happy about all this; it certainly makes it easier to hunt down people willing to confirm gossip about their acquaintances. And it's satisfying to have our conspiracy theories confirmed — and quoted by civil libertarians at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who, along with the ACLU, have raised serious objections these "privacy" changes.

But there's something maddening about watching Facebook bumble its way into another privacy debacle, one approaching in its disastrousness the launch of the Beacon advertising/stalking system a few years back. If only Facebook's investors agreed. But then they're not exactly a pack of civil liberties advocates, now are they?

(Top pic: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, by Simon Doggett)

Facebook's 350 million+ users are being greeted by the dialog below, an "Important... Privacy Announcement" that "simplifies" and "adds" privacy controls:

But like Mark Zuckerberg's "Open Letter" last week, this is just the smiley pro-"privacy" wrapper around the real agenda, which, as Peter Kafka at All Things D wrote, is quite plainly to get you to abandon your privacy. Rival startup Twitter has taught Facebook that there's big growth in public internet sharing.

Thus — Ta Da! — these new default settings, which suggest users share their posts and information with the whole world. From Kafka (click to enlarge):

Inside Facebook's Eric Eldon got similarly liberal suggestions:

To make this scheme a bit more defensible, Facebook will now allow users to set their privacy level — i.e. to reverse the default choices — on a post-by-post basis, a feature long requested by users. Thus, Facebook will become an endless series of privacy decisions and dilemmas. It's enough to make you rush into the open arms of Twitter. Because while microblogging about your lunch might be narcissistic and pointless, it's definitely less narcissistic and pointless than deciding who should get to see the post about what you had for lunch.

Facebook: Asking you questions you don't want to have to answer about content no one cares about. Isn't social networking a joy ride?

As part of his 2010 AG bid, Kelly emailed prospective supporters (see below), touting legislation that makes sex offenders register their social network identities. A similar law in New York recently revealed 2,782 sex offenders were using Facebook, some under multiple screen names. Democrat Kelly wants to uncover similar Facebook users out West, and asks people to email their legislators a message stating, "I urge you to pass e-STOP here in California to keep people safe from online predators."

Which is all well and good, but kind of begs the question: Since California already has a public sex offenders database, couldn't Facebook simply collect enough information from users to cross-reference that list? And if it doesn't do so, for privacy reasons, wouldn't executives like, say, the chief privacy officer be answerable for that apparently regrettable trade off between safety and revenue growth? Just asking!

Email from Kelly (click to enlarge):

Email Kelly suggests his supporters send (excerpt):

(Top pic: Kelly, by Esther Dyson)

That, we admit, is just our shameless, cynical speculation. Facebook wants people to share their content with everyone, like on rival hot-startup Twitter, but most people are content just sharing with their regional networks. So why not kill the regionals and push users to share with the world by default?

Paranoid? Maybe. But this conspiracy theory happens to fit snugly with what facts are known:

• Many users now restrict their content to regional networks like the city in which they live.
  
• Facebook recently introduced a feature allowing people to share their content even more widely, with everyone, Twitter style. But, frustratingly for Facebook, most people don't use this, as TechCrunch points out.
• When it kills the regional networks, Facebook will introduce new privacy "controls that we think will be better for you." Read: "We'll be making decisions of various sorts on your behalf."
  
• Zuckerberg encourages everyone to "read through all your [privacy] options and customize them for yourself." This implies you don't have to do that, if you're comfortable with Facebook's new privacy scheme and whatever default decisions the company has made.
  
• Even if you do customize your privacy settings, Facebook will "suggest settings for you based on your current level of privacy." Read: If you're sharing with your regional network, we'll probably suggest you share with the world.

This wouldn't be the first time Facebook ham-fistedly pushed users into oversharing; the social network is still infamous for Beacon, the spammy advertising scheme that automatically sucked up data from outside websites, ruining engagement proposals and holiday gift surprises and eventually prompting a lawsuit. Facebook finally shut the thing off in September.

Unlike Beacon, which users could not opt out of at launch, this new "privacy" scheme will immediately be customizable by users. Zuckerberg has thus avoided a major mistake this time around. What's more, his "open letter" shows a newfound appreciation for the power of PR gestures, even softball PR gestures painfully short on actual details (those will come in the "next couple of weeks," says Zuckerberg).

But, smiley-face posturing aside, users should never forget that Facebook remains, at heart, not a community but a Silicon Valley startup, always hungry for exponential growth and new revenue streams. So be sure to review those new privacy "options," and take Facebook's recommendations with a huge grain of salt.

(Pic: Zuckerberg, by Silverisdead on Flickr)

The whole incident was, naturally, promptly uploaded to YouTube; you can bask in its full matrimonial glory in the clip above. Bride Tracy Park had no idea Hanna was going to do this, according to TechCrunch, which is just as well, since now she can claim innocence in this ultimate monument to techno-narcissism.

At least it was intended as sort of parody. We hope.

Lawless, teen-heavy MySpace used to be considered the online place for pervs — Saturday Night Live even made a funny skit about it (embedded below). No more: Numbers published in the New York Daily News reveal that Facebook is the favored destination, attracting 79 percent of the registered sex offenders who declared accounts at the big social networks, versus 51 percent for MySpace. The numbers don't add up to 100 because many offenders had accounts on both networks; see the chart we made above for a different slice, or look at the precise the numerical breakdown in the image below.

The migration of these unsavories onto Facebook was inevitabe, particularly after Facebook relaxed its requirement that its members be in college or be college alumni. People want to join the social network everyone else is joining. Sex offenders are definitely no exception.

[via Wired Epicenter]

The spring makeover, an awkward attempt to ape Twitter, overwhelmed Facebook users with excess information. Over the summer, Facebook tested a stripped-down "LIte" interface that pulled back much of the clutter. Now, there's a new design previewed in PCinpact.com that, as noted by Business Insider's Alaska Miller, consolidates the chat-and-notification-toolbar at the bottom of the current Facebook homepage with the search bar and account links at the top. In other words, continues the quest for the sort of simplicity Facebook used to have.

Before:

After (click to enlarge) (via):

(Top pic: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, by Mathieu Thouvenin)

The suit was probably inevitable. As we first reported, the Sacramento-based firm of Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff has been looking for victims of scammy ads in games like Mafia Wars and Farmville to potentially file a class action suit. Less than a week later, the firm's suit has hit federal district court in Northern California.

You can read the initial complaint in full here.

Neither gaming startup Zynga nor social network Facebook actually originates the advertisements in question; instead, other companies take out ads in Zynga's games, which run on Facebook's network, and the two companies make reportedly large sums of money from the offers. Some of the ads trick users into signing up for unauthorized cell phone charges or expensive mail-order products like educational CDs, typically by disguising them as "free" offers or "free trials," or as part of an "online quiz." TechCrunch has run an aggressive series of articles, cataloged at the bottom of this post.

Zynga reportedly takes in close to one-third of its revenue from "commercial offers" like those, and Facebook does well too, as KC&R lawyers point out in their complaint. An excerpt (click to enlarge):

Swift's attorneys also point to Zynga CEO Mark Pincus' damning video confession that "I did every horrible thing in the book just to get revenues" in their complaint, indicating it will be a significant piece of courtroom evidence, just as we predicted.

The prospect of being on the hook for massive damages has to make both Zynga and Facebook's investors sweat. Facebook is the darling of Silicon Valley, with VCs having valued it in the billions of dollars, while Zynga counts the elite firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers among its major investors. Yet both companies have come to rely on greasy advertisers for much of their revenue; in addition to the game-ad scammers, Facebook is also sells ad to marketers who resort to tactics like using stolen pictures of apparent underaged girls to promote their products. If the company's are found to be liable of helping con customers by working with these sorts of slimeballs, it's hard to say where the payouts might end.

Below, an excerpt of the scams allegedly perpetrated on the lead plaintiff in the case, Rebecca Swift.

(Top pic: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, by Raphaël Labbé)

[Full court filing]

Click any image to enlarge.

TechCrunch publisher Mike Arrington began writing his high-profile posts exposing the misleading ads carried by Zynga on October 31. Four days later, according to documents filed with the SEC yesterday, Zynga began issuing shares as part of its latest $15 million round of financing that included firms like the gold-standard Silicon Valley shop Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (past investments: Google, Amazon, Netscape, etc.), as PaidContent points out.

Of course, it took until Nov. 6 for video to emerge of Zynga CEO Mark Pincus admitting that some of the ads his company ran were "horrible." But we'd venture to guess that Zynga's investors, now into the startup for at least $54 million, would still have gone forward with their investment even that video emerged earlier. They care no more about Zynga's murky origins than they did about those of Zynga's chief clients like MySpace (born from a spam and spyware operation) and Facebook (which paid $65 million to settle claims it was founded on stolen technology). In Silicon Valley, the sins of the past are regularly washed away by infinite promise of the all-important future.

(Pic: Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, by Joi Ito)