[notauser]

To you this is news.

To a lot of people this is like finding out that someone has spidered and indexed their conversations at the pub.

Their fault? Sure. But a lot of people react worse to bad events when a mistake they made caused it, especially if they were warned before hand. Anticipating hearing 'we told you so' is not going to make the general public feel calm and relaxed.

[motters]

Indeed. Most ordinary Facebook users who are not avid followers of tech news probably have very little idea about these things, and just assume that "it's me and my friends". The appearance of Facebook does little or nothing to give the impression that the information being entered is being publicly broadcast.

If Facebook wants to continue to have an overly complicated privacy policy perhaps a solution is to colour code sections of facebook, where teh colour of the text or background indicates the level of privacy.

[davidbr02]

I just feel like after the recent legitimate privacy concerns Facebook has had, people are now trying to break the next big Facebook scandal and in doing so are bringing up pretty ridiculous points like your public information being public. I don't feel that this is a failure on Facebook's part, it is a failure on the users part for not understanding what public means or just not paying attention.