Recommended Facebook Privacy Settings: Everyone?

Okay, can I just rant here for a second about the never-ending drumbeat of Facebook and its goose-stepping march towards the Island of Absolutely No Privacy? I mean, after weeks of being beaten up by the industry and users alike about it pushing people towards having more and more information publicly accessible on a site that started out incredibly private and closed (heck, if you weren't in one of the selected colleges, you couldn't even join!).

Now they've introduced their new privacy settings and have a "Recommended" option. But check it out...

First, here's my default privacy setting with the new fancy grid display:

I'm pretty public, but you can see that on Facebook I really like to limit my information to friends or friends-of-friends, rather than everyone. The only info I share with the world at large -- the 500 million Facebook users -- is my bio and favorite quotations.

Click on "Recommended", however, and check out what it suggests:

Yup, Facebook believes that "privacy" = "share most everything with everyone on the service", including all your status updates, photos, and even notes that you leave (which for many people means their blog posts, with the RSS feed tracked by Facebook). Really?

if you want recommended settings, choose Friends of Friends instead, at least:

That's a bit better, though with the multiplication of the social graph your 500 friends could mean that 25,000 people are seeing your status updates, etc., which might not be what you want either.

Oh, and while you're at it, find and check this area out too:

And Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of teh Facebook team, can you please just encourage people towards more privacy rather than less? That's kinda what we're upset about, after all...