Unfortunately, facebook's privacy controls are only as strong as it makes them - and facebook is only trustworthy as long as it maintains its users' trust. When it loosens its privacy controls without notifying its' users is when that trust starts to be put in doubt. Strong privacy controls are essential to user trust and widespread adoption for a variety of usage situations, both professional and personal. By reducing users' ability to control access to their own self-provided information, or worse still - what they did do - by allowing users to control such access, giving them a sense of security, and then later eliminating that control (and setting the default to "wide open"), they undermine the very concept of social networking. http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/facebook-privacy-transition-where-it-heading cheers.