T.Scott has an interesting take on the Facebook privacy issue in this post descriptively titled "It May As Well Be On the Front Page of the NYT."
The post suggests that the problem is not necessarily about privacy or lack of privacy, it's whether expectations of privacy match up with reality. If you go into something like Facebook with limited expectations, and a policy of assuming that everything you post online could be seen by everyone in the world, you'll have fewer unpleasant surprises. (Except possibly, depending on your level of extroversion, how little everyone in the world cares.)
This rings true for me to some extent, possibly because I also have pretty much tended to assume that anything I post could be seen by anyone, even though in reality almost no one cares. And in general things are in fact fairly private, in the sense that if you're one of several million people talking to themselves in public, you're relatively safe even if you're talking about your darkest secrets, because what are the odds that anyone who knows you is going to hear? Among multitudes lies anonymity.
That said, I don't talk about my darkest secrets (which I assure you are so blood-curdling and hair-raising that even to tap the keys required to describe them would send me into conniptions right here), because you never can tell.
Someone could always come along and overhear at any time, even if they never did before (especially given the archival nature of web communication), and I think it's wise to remember that. I also do think that some people may have unrealistic expectations of how close-to-the-vest their information actually is out there on the social web, on blogs, networking sites, ratings sites, etc.
On the other hand, to look at a slightly different angle on the question, I feel sympathy for people who may themselves post cautiously but wind up appearing online in the indiscreet posts of other people. You definitely hear things like "I don't even have a Facebook account, but my bitter ex-boyfriend is using his to post drunken photos of me!", and that really does seem like a problem.
You can control your own online behavior, but may have no control over what someone else does, and other people can make your secrets just as public as you can if they have the information.
Which gets into non-Facebook issues like "be careful who you trust with your secrets," and I guess would technically be a legal issue (who owns a person's image/info and has a right to post it?--can you make them stop?) rather than strictly one of privacy policies.
Because it might well be against a policy to post pictures of people who don't want you to, but it's not as if Facebook is going to be requiring signed consent forms for every photo posted. It would have such an inhibiting effect on people posting photos at all that Facebook would probably lose members to Flickr or someplace that didn't have such a requirement, and there you are. You can't be losing members! Those precious, precious eyeballs and tidbits of personal, advertise-to-able information are the blood of life.
It's just a lot easier for random stuff you say or do to be seen by everyone in the world these days, and I do understand the plaint that it sucks to basically be told you have to be careful about everything you do or say everywhere, because someone else might catch you on their cellphone camera, even if you've always been the soul of discretion online.
Its one thing to assume everything you post online might as well be on the cover of the New York Times, and another to live your life assuming that you could also be the subject of someone else's NYT piece at any moment. Are we all tiny celebrities potentially being stalked by part-time paparazzi?
It's an interesting world.
But overall, yes, I agree with the original post: assume everything you put online is public! Wildly, outrageously public! Everyone in the world is looking at it right now!
At the same time, lest that give you an inflated sense of self-importance, you should also assume that no human eye will ever see it.
This is a nice bit of mental gymnastics that I like to think will help keep the brain in shape.
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