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Facebook recently unveiled several changes to its service that give users much more sharing alternatives, but in the procedure the firm demonstrated what quite a few have come to believe is its intentional disregard for user privacy.

This mistake feels a lot like Facebook’s February 2009 debacle when the business changed its user agreement in an “all take, no give” arrangement that gave the business the right to use, in perpetuity, all info shared by its users on the internet site. Users rebelled and Facebook backed down instantly.

But this time it’s distinct. With these recent updates, Facebook has given users two essential things: Less difficult techniques to share and participate among communities of interest within the network and much more privacy and protection settings to accommodate this new structure.

Facebook’s mistake is two-fold. First, the default privacy settings for the new Facebook are not Friends, Friends of Friends, or all of Facebook, but the entire Net. Second, Facebook has provided no easy road map for just how to navigate to the 50 privacy settings in order to pick from among the far more than 170 privacy options.

Users’ confusion over the default settings and how to change them, along with lackluster explanations of the advantages of the new changes, has developed the usual uproar we’ve come to expect each time Facebook tweaks our property away from house.

Sadly for Facebook, this update has also created what analysts suspect is an improve in the number of users wanting to delete their Facebook accounts. The number of searches for “how do i delete my facebook account [sic]” have increased significantly since the changes were announced, and a mass exodus from Facebook has been scheduled for May possibly 31.

Nothing On the Web Is Totally free

Facebook has over 400 million users, and after the mass exodus, the internet site will have over 400 million users.

The changes Facebook has made are component of Facebook’s inevitable monetizing strategy. And that’s the point. Nothing about Facebook is free. Facebook has never been in the game not to make dollars. And it’s finally performing so. This year the company is expected to have revenues of between .2 and billion. And yes, some of that will be profit.

Facebook will ultimately strike the essential balance between its bottom line and its users. They often do. But what users have to recognize is that one reality will remain: Facebook will make cash off of the information users share on its site.

To those for whom this is a bad thing, Facebook is not the place to be. Profile details is the most valuable information for marketers on the Web, and no single Web service has a lot more of this type of info than Facebook. Facebook will continue along its path to use this data to make cash in order to stay in organization and to continue to give users the services they sign up for in droves.

The critics are proper: Facebook wants to make mountains of money. But they can only do it if its users are happy.

The Wild Wild Web

A lot of the information you share on Facebook – your email address, phone number, physical address – is already public on the web and would remain so if Facebook went away tomorrow. This details was there before Facebook and exists on the web independently of Facebook.

Take a look at Pipl.com. Type in your name or the name of your very best friend, or your worst enemy, and see what pops up. A recent search on this writer’s name produced the following data:

Contact details from Whitepages.com, Spokeo.com, and two other people
Background reports from Intelius.com
Personal profiles from MySpace, Spokeo, LinkedIn, Members-Base, Bebo and Flickr
Email addresses from Inelius that are so old I caught myself wanting to say they pre-date the Web
Public records which includes birth records from BirthDetails.com and Intelius
Videos from YouTube
Web pages
Blog posts
Documents

Several websites like this have emerged over the years. Pipl, Spokeo and Zillow.com, to name a couple of, all publish info several users feel is private. But in reality, it is not. It’s really public, and internet sites like these aggregate this info from public sources.

Which leads to a not-so-recent trend in social media, but one that is about to see the roof blow off simply because of yet one more new initiative by Facebook.

The trend is social media aggregation, where info from distinct social media sites is pulled together in one location so that it can be much more simply digested. Several aggregation services, like Gist, FriendFeed and NetVibes, give tools and widgets that let users combine messages, search several social media web sites at once, track friends, and even access their profile data all from one place, all in an attempt to simplify an individual’s social media participation.

With the recent introduction of Open Graph, Facebook will attempt to take social aggregation into the stratosphere. In fact, Facebook wants to turn the whole Web into your personal aggregator.

Currently, various social media websites contribute to some part of the social graph. Yelp is mapping out the component of the graph that connects men and women to local businesses. Pandora is mapping out the component related to music. With Open Graph, Facebook plans to bring these graphs together.

“If we can take these separate maps of the graph and pull them all together,” says Zuckerberg, as reported by CNET.com, “then we can produce a Web that’s smarter, much more social, far more personalized, and a lot more semantically conscious.”

He goes on to say, “These connections aren’t just happening on Facebook, they’re happening all over the Web, and today with the Open Graph we’re bringing all these things together.”

If you use Facebook, you might be surprised to come across you’re already participating in its new social graph. Go to Account > Privacy Settings and click on Applications and Web sites. There you’ll see Instant Personalization Pilot Program. Click on it to see the beginnings of a monumental change on the Web.

Great Rules of Thumb

Just take into account that anything you say on Facebook is public, and don’t say anything that you would have to whisper to anyone who you’re dining with at an outdoor cafe.

Each time you enable a Facebook app to access your profile data, read the Terms and Conditions for that app. Apps are bound by neither Facebook’s Privacy Policy nor its Terms and Conditions. They are third-party relationships, and when you share your Facebook details with them you do so independently of Facebook. Apps are how a lot of profile info leaks out of Facebook. Facebook ought to be clearer about this and ought to be far more concerned for users’ privacy when it comes to third-party apps, and it wouldn’t be surprising if their approach to apps changes sometime soon.

Other internet sites offering FacebookConnect are safe. FacebookConnect is a service that lets users appreciate their Facebook relationships on other internet sites. Users can sign in with their Facebook username and password and discover what their friends come across interesting on a particular site. The third-party web site does not have access to your Facebook profile data.