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It's complicated because advertising companies profit from networks that are open and visible.

Facebook's privacy controls used to be very straight-forward and easy to use. Starting with Beacon, etc. Facebook's strategy has been to make it as complicated and time-consuming as possible in the hopes that you will just acquiesce and allow them to profit from your personal information and online social interactions.

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Facebook's made a lot of mistakes but I disagree with you pretty completely here. It doesn't help your case that Facebook just last week released a new dedicated privacy menu that is exceedingly nice, simple, straightfoward. It goes out of its way to summarize your privacy settings for you.

I'm not sure I agree completely with either of you.

Instead, I prefer to not attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity. Or too many people deploying features willy-nilly.

It could also be a business model that is unwieldy to implement.

Or a business model that is fundamentally based on exploiting your personal information.

Of course, but maintaining the perception that it's harmless to continue to contribute it is the hard part.

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