> Whilst I find this whole privacy setting issue unpleasant and frustrating, I am continually amazed that people would be Facebook friends with parents and relatives - from whom they would prefer to keep things hidden.
> I would not let my parents sit in the room whilst I chatted with friends, or listen in on phone calls. I would not let them go through the photos on my phone, nor those of me on the phones of friends.
Same with most people. Most people have different personas for different groups--they have their family persona that they present to their parents and other relatives, their casual friend persona they present to most of their friends, their intimate persona they present to close friends and lovers, their work persona for co-workers, and often others.
Facebook has purposefully decided to ignore that, and insist that you have a single Facebook persona. That gives you a couple poor choices for how to use Facebook. You can pick one of your personas and make that your Facebook persona, and do not "friend" anyone with it who does not belong with that persona. This is hard to explain to those groups that you use the other personas with.
Or you can try to use Facebook's poorly designed, poorly implemented, poorly documented, frequently changing, and laughably inadequate privacy controls to try to beat their "one size fits all" persona approach into something approximating the reality of any normal person's life--and if you ever trip up, you have a good risk of blowing up some aspect of your life.