It's not completely backwards: both ways are gross generalizations. For one thing,
my mom won't join Facebook because "the privacy toggles are confusing," whereas many of my geek friends won't enable 2-step authentication
or even https (on both Google and Facebook) because "meh, why bother."
But that's not what "your mom" is about. We use the "your mom" persona when we want to put ourselves in the shoes of someone who interacts with technology in a ridiculously different way than we do. Also, it's endearingly masculinist.
So. Your mom might be fooled into oversharing by accident. She also might be too scared to ever share anything, because she doesn't know how to control privacy settings. Both situations are bad for your mom, and Facebook has plenty of both (like I said, my actual mom being an instance of the second).
This way, your mom just taught us that the usability of Facebook in regards to privacy is downright horrible. I have no idea how your mom (or mine for that matter) will react to Google+, and quite frankly, I think this will be a very controversial issue until real moms start toying with it.