Normally people wait until April 1 to pull of such an hilarious jest, but Facebook just couldn’t wait. Facebook announced today its new privacy policy that, according some critics, is more an “anti-privacy” policy. April fools!

Using the guise of shielding more of your personal information, and giving you more control over the information you enter into Facebook, it turns out that Facebook is actually making it harder, if not impossible, to shield your personal information, and is making more of that information available to others--whether you like it or not.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) does a systematic walk-through of Facebook’s new privacy policy and finds some changes good, some bad, and some down right ugly. The good is simple: Facebook is now more open about your ability to set privacy options, and has simplified the process of doing so. Facebook’s changes include the ability to define privacy on a per-post basis. “[T]hese are positive developments that hopefully will lead more people to carefully review and customize their level of privacy on Facebook,” says the EFF.

The bad, the EFF says, are the abysmal privacy settings recommended by Facebook. While prior default settings limited access to your networks and friends, the new default settings make your information available to everyone, everywhere. Lesson here, says the EFF, don’t accept Facebook’s privacy recommendations.

Still, it doesn’t much matter. EFF gets down to the ugly: a lot of personal information you could once shield is now open to the public, regardless of what you want. And not just your information, but the information of all your friends as well. Facebook says this information was never really private, or that it could be obtained by other means, or that users didn’t really care. EFF doesn’t quite buy Facebook’s explanations. And it worries, given the nature of data mining, the information about you available to anyone and everyone (including third-party app developers--whether you use the app or not), poses risks that you won't realize until it's too late.

For Facebook users it should be caveat utilitor. Facebook’s need to trade on your personal information appears to have trumped your concerns for privacy, so take care.

 

Image Credit: bejealousofme/Flickr

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