> I’d like to have my profile visible only to my friends, not my boss. Cannot.
> I’d like to support an anti-abortion group without my mother or the world knowing. Cannot.
Great examples of what Facebook cannot do, and what the Facebook replacement must do.
Ironically, right before the big push to erode users' privacy, it seemed that they might have taken it a step further and replaced your name with "facebook user", removing even your first name (I was never sure if this was intentional or a bug, but in any case it didn't last long as the big privacy changes came soon after).
We know how valuable the data is and what can be done with it, that makes us much more sensitive to giving it up.
B. Change your privacy settings, Make it so you can only be found by searching certain things (eg: email address), Block your boss
C. Unfortunately not (yet?)
A few people who can't be bothered to back up their own work and data, nor to respond to announcements of upcoming changes, may be pissed when items are "lost". But no one's privacy is compromised. Further, if you provide clear means of such a back up and/or instructions and advisement to maintain private copies, you can help lessen this second problem.
That's something to Google's credit, that they've officially supported and developed means for users to retrieve their data locally into documented, usable formats.
B. Much of your personal data is still publicly available through Facebook Graph, regardless of how much you try to lock down your profile. It's only a matter of time before people start scraping this information and publishing it in a way that it's clearly accessible from Google, and Facebook won't be able to do anything about it.
I don't think this is true, as an example here is what the graph API shows about my account:
{
"id": "800679",
"name": "Matthew Brown",
"first_name": "Matthew",
"last_name": "Brown",
"location": {
"id": null,
"name": null
},
"gender": "male"
}
2) Before the Graph, it was possible to hide all of this information completely if you used the strictest privacy settings. You could completely hide the fact that you had a facebook account; even the things you published on public FB pages would just show your first name and a placeholder photo.
3) Before the Graph, it wasn't possible to systematically scrape the info of all Facebook users sequentially. The fact that this is now possible will make it easy to collate the data and publish information about you that you haven't personally shared. Most users' photo albums are set to "everyone" (by accident, of course), but previously they were pretty much undiscoverable even if they were public. I'm pretty certain that this is going to be exploted by sploggers and others, just like every other large publicly accessible source of data.
For example, if your friend list privacy is set to "Everyone", accessing your facebook page while logged out will show a random sample of your friends. Switch the privacy setting to "only friends" or something restrictive, return to the profile page in a logged out state, and note that your friends no longer are displayed.
EDIT: To clarify, I'm not talking about the publicly exposed "graph". I'm talking about what they've long provided to their third party affiliates, e.g. all the approved Facebook "application" developers/hosts.
P.S. Notice the nice information asymmetry involved in this, as well. You, as a private individual, have no access to this. But designated (and / as in paying) parties do, at the sole selection (I think I'll avoid use of the word "discretion") of Facebook.
Summing it up: would we even be having this conversation if Facebook, from day 1, started with defaulting all data as public, being clear about it, and making data securing hard to accomplish?