Most people take their privacy quite seriously – I know I do. In fact, it’s of such great concern to me that I’m writing this post under a pseudonym and passing off some photo I found on a dodgy singles site as my profile picture.

Considering how paranoid many of us are then, it’s ironic that since December millions of Facebook users across the globe have been unwittingly sharing their status updates, interests and activities with anyone who cares to search for them.

Unfortunately, while this is bound to get them further bad press, the bottom line is that it’s unlikely to have repercussions beyond that, for the simple reason that Facebook is far too ingrained in most of our lives for some suspect policies to justify jumping ship.

Some Facebook users are concerned about locking away their profiles, whilst some are unfortunately oblivious. Image Credit: Picasaweb

This is a result of Facebook’s decision to change its default privacy settings and publically display a user’s basic profile information until he or she opts out; a move that’s been condemned by pretty much everyone who’s caught wind of it, while comments made by their CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, during January only served to anger people further:

“A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they've built, doing a privacy change - doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner's mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.”

In short, if he were to start Facebook anew, user data would be public right from the start. This went completely against Zuckerberg’s previous sentiments, as two years earlier he had told ReadWriteWeb that the privacy controls were “the vector around which Facebook operates”.

Since January he’s had everyone from the New York Times to Business Week on his back, with (apparently idle) threats of FTC (Federal Trade Commission) action thrown in for good measure. It’s not surprising then that Facebook says it’s taken the complaints to heart and will be revising its privacy settings, with the changes expected to go live later today.

At this point we should all start whooping with joy, right? Not quite. As it turns out, these revisions are merely changes to the interface aimed at making it easier for users to hide their profiles, and otherwise everything will remain as is.

Which is bound to piss off a lot of people, but Facebook likely regards this as a risk worth taking; the greater the number of publicly accessible accounts, the further their influence will spread and the more traffic their site will attract (think Real-Time Search, Organic Search and integration with partner sites, for starters).

Although Facebook is making it easier to opt-out of showing personal details, continuing to share them by default means that millions of users will continue to make their information and status updates accessible simply because they don’t know any better. Unless Zuckerberg rolls out a big red button with ‘INCOGNITO’ emblazoned on it, this will be a trivial change at best.

Also check out:

• The Price of Privacy? Ask Google.
• A Look at Facebook Fan Pages - An Update