Facebook Privacy is a contradiction in terms

As you all know, Facebook changed its privacy settings "for your benefit". As we noted earlier, this is bollocks, its all about getting their mitts on your data. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has the best analysis of this so, being a lazy blog, we precis its analysis:

The Good: Simpler Privacy Settings and Per-Post Privacy Options

The new changes have definitely simplified Facebook's privacy settings, reducing the overall number of settings while making them clearer and easier for users to find and understand. The simplification of Facebook's privacy settings includes the elimination of regional networks, which sometimes would lead people to unwittingly share their Facebook profile with an entire city, or, as Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg explained in a recent open letter, an entire country.

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The Bad: EFF Doesn't Recommend Facebook's "Recommended" Privacy Settings

Although sold as a "privacy" revamp, Facebook's new changes are obviously intended to get people to open up even more of their Facebook data to the public. The privacy "transition tool" that guides users through the configuration will "recommend" — preselect by default — the setting to share the content they post to Facebook, such as status messages and wall posts, with everyone on the Internet, even though the default privacy level that those users had accepted previously was limited to "Your Networks and Friends" on Facebook

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The Ugly: Information That You Used to Control Is Now Treated as "Publicly Available," and You Can't Opt Out of The "Sharing" of Your Information with Facebook Apps

Looking even closer at the new Facebook privacy changes, things get downright ugly when it comes to controlling who gets to see personal information such as your list of friends. Under the new regime, Facebook treats that information — along with your name, profile picture, current city, gender, networks, and the pages that you are a "fan" of — as "publicly available information" or "PAI." Before, users were allowed to restrict access to much of that information. Now, however, those privacy options have been eliminated. For example, although you used to have the ability to prevent everyone but your friends from seeing your friends list, that old privacy setting — shown below — has now been removed completely from the privacy settings page.

In other words, the word "Privacy" has been redefined by Facebook (and, it must be said some other Web 2.0 darlings) to mean "rampant extraction of your private data for general exposure and datamining". This is an inevitable result of the failure of the Advertising business model to fund te social networks, as we pointed out in our paper "FreeConomics - Why your data is free but everywhere in chains"

If you add this to the Facebook Terms and Conditions (Facebook has the right to use your content for itself in any way into perpetuity) then its very clear that if you use the system for much more than the most banal of things, and expect your privacy to be kept intact, you are an A List sucker. But then, they already have 350m of them and, as others have noted beforehand, new ones are born every minute.

It will be interesting to see how this plays to the EU Data Protection regulations. While the regulations are a bit fuzzy, this definitely flies in the face of the intent

(Update - its Monday 14th, 5 days later and the whole shebang has finally hit the fan, this one is typical)