Change your Facebook privacy settings, please!

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Facebook’s new privacy settings will go the way of the late, not-at-all-lamented Beacon. That is — poof.

Less than 24 hours after Facebook’s 350 million users were greeted at login by the announcement of updates to its privacy settings, experts are already chiming in — and advising against the new so-called improvements. As of yesterday, Facebook is asking all users to review and update their privacy settings. But here’s the catch –you knew there had to be one, didn’t you?. Facebook is making its own privacy recommendations, which will take effect by default unless users change them. In most cases, the recommendation will be that users over 18 share all information with “everyone” — Facebook’s 350 million users as well as search engines. In other words, what you post on Facebook will essentially be available to the world.

The issue is that while Facebook is spinning the changes as “setting a new standard in user control,” another goal is clearly getting users to share more information publicly, which makes its search partnerships with Google and Bing all the more valuable. Security and digital rights experts are seeing right through it.

It’s Facebook’s gazillion all-too-human users who may not.

Facebook has had a range of privacy settings available for quite some time. In fact, many of the infamous Facebook bloopers — the drunken party pictures, the work-related mental health days – are easily avoided by using them. But the majority of users — 80-85% by Facebook’s estimates — don’t change their default privacy settings. People forget; don’t know they can; don’t get it. Facebook is counting on that. The company’s new strategy is based on hoping as much information as possible is available to the Web at large.

Digital rights groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation today warned people against accepting Facebook’s suggestions. “To ensure that users don’t accidentally share more than they intend to, we do not recommend Facebook’s ‘recommended’ settings,” attorney Kevin Bankstonwrote in a blog post.

But it gets worse, folks. After all, users still can choose to opt out of the defaults.

The change that really has advocates seeing red is that Facebook is now — for the first time — officially classifying a host of data as “publicly available information.” Amazingly, included in this category are users’ names, profile pictures, cities, gender, networks, list of friends and pages people are fans of. What concerns me is the many newbies who overshare in the INFO tab. I can’t tell you how many times I have asked friends and family to remove home addresses, phone numbers and other too-personal information.

Do you want the world to know you’re a fan of Sarah Palin’s Heli-shooting at the Wolves group? Or friends with that porn star who knows Tiger?

While the EFF says it will theoretically be possible for users to hide their friends list from the Web at large, doing so will involve going to the profile editing settings and changing the number of friends displayed to zero — a confusing process, to say the least. “If the goal with these changes was to clarify the privacy settings and make them easier to find and use, then Facebook has completely failed when it comes to controlling who sees who[m] you are friends with,” the EFF says.

Additionally, developers of third-party apps — some of whom have already played fast-and-loose with privacy –now can get all of the so-called publicly available information about users when their friends download the apps. (Friends, this is why I won’t take that quiz or return the beer you sent me.)

The potential good news here? Facebook is known for backpedaling. The company was relatively quick to retreat on the last privacy brouhaha called Beacon.

The ACLU has launched a petition drive imploring CEO Mark Zuckerberg to revise the company’s new settings.

Here’s what the ACLU of Northern California said in the comments of Mashable’s post yesterday:

“As you’ve pointed out, the ‘privacy’ changes are all about encouraging [users] to share more stuff publicly.’ It’s great that Facebook is making all users think about privacy, but we are concerned that the transition tool and other changes actually discourage or eliminate some privacy protections that Facebook users currently employ.”

Thank you Mediapost and Mashable.