It's also fairly difficult when they intentionally make it hard for the distinction of public/non public to be understood. "People you may know" is a privacy violation. "A friend commented on such and such post" is a priacy violation.
A social network is more like a magical bulletin board that tries to make itself as visible to as many people as possible. Perhaps you don't like that the bulletin board does that, but it's not rude. You're 100% free to not make posts there. I recommend it, in fact.
In the original article linked above, the situation was that users expected their social information to remain private to the ~100 friends they shared it with, and sued Facebook because it ended up in the hands of Cambridge Analytica. Facebook's attorney's counterpoint is that when you share information with friends, you give up any expectation of privacy as it pertains to these friends. And in this particular case, it was the friends who shared that information with some Facebook app by Kogan(sp?), who then shared it with Cambrige Analytica.
I find the argument pretty convincing, actually. If you tell your friend a secret, and they tell someone else, even if it's a corporation, then that's that. If you share your Spotify playlist with a friend, and in turn they give up all their friends' playlists data (including yours) to some app, then imo that's kind of on you for sharing.
The situation I disagree with is if you tell your friend a secret, and then the communication platform that you used to share that secret (your phone company, the hotel you're staying in, Gmail, Facebook, whatever) decides to share it with third parties.
The way I see it, it's Facebook's platform, and it's up to them to build features as they see fit. The news feed works how the news feed works. There's nothing to "fix," and there's nothing rude about it. It's just an optional feature on a website on the Internet, and of course you don't have to use it if you don't like it.
It was a big change when Facebook introduced the newsfeed back in 2006 or 2007 and I do remember people calling it the ‘stalker feed’ and there being a big facebook group with a million members asking for it to be removed. But people got over it, liked it, and instead of moving to myspace or one of the many alternative social networks stuck with facebook and facebook just got bigger and bigger thanks to users loving it.
We are just fortunate enough to be able to fix this problem for ourselves using a browser extension. Others just complain.
Facebook only opened membership to non-college or high school students in Sept 2006 in fact - so if we had wanted to jump ship because of the 'stalker feed', there were still plenty of other options (e.g. MySpace) and the chance for a disruptor to launch if the other options weren't suitable. In practice, users chose to join Facebook and grow it to what we know it as now.
Within the scope of X likes Y, X said Z, Facebook has a very consistent and strong privacy model [1]. However, they have long considered anything that isn't a hard privacy violation of their rules to be fair game. Technically (and this is FB's engineering mindset showing through) not surfacing information is security through obscurity.
It seems like they are backing away from that model, by deprecating features like Graph Search. I personally think that this is worse because it makes it much harder for people to understand what is visible to others. It muddies the rule of "if you don't want people to know something, don't put it on Facebook".
[1] There are some messier areas, like People You May Know, or when platform apps are allowed to access (and store) all they data that a person who uses that app could see.
Especially in the world of health, there is a clear distinction about what is private, public, and confidential/secret. This case very clearly public.