It's hard to believe that a site with 300 million users and massively downplayed (but very serious) changes rolled out today to its privacy policy are getting nary a blip in the national media, and only a couple of small stories in tech zines, despite a growing furor from users. But if you're on Facebook, you should be angry, and demanding your control over your privacy returned to you.

 The changes were clothed in a cheery "we're simplifying things and giving you more control over your privacy!" While it's true that there were a couple of changes that were useful and long awaited - such as allowing users to control the privacy levels of individual status updates - they came at a price. And that price was privacy itself.

Previously, users had been able to control with some amount of granularity what was displayed on their profiles, and what was publicly available. Facebook argued that most users didn't use these settings, but also admitted that they were difficult to find. In the same sweeping motion that simplified the privacy settings, Facebook made certain information publicly available: name, profile picture, gender, current city, friends and fan pages. Until today, users could make most of this information private. All of this information is now considered public, and there's nothing that you can do about it.

To boot, Facebook is now encouraging its users through the "transition tool" to make all their posts and information public, a la Twitter. Since most users tend to follow whatever Facebook recommends, many people may not realize that all the information they thought was private will now be public, if they use what Facebook recommends. 

There's a storm slowly brewing about this on Facebook, which can be seen in the thousands of comments demanding the return of privacy in the Facebook governance page. Facebook's response has been to remind folks that they can turn off certain elements of the profile to people who are logged in, and hide themselves from search results - but then turn around and remind everyone that this information is publicly available, so people who are surfing Facebook but not logged in will be able to see the now public information.

Let's get this straight. You can hide it from people who are logged in, but not from people who are not logged in. How does that make any sense whatsoever?

We're getting there. And there's a great article on all of this over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation that goes through the nitty gritty and why you should really care about this. But let's cover some of it here, shall we?

So. What's the big deal? Does it matter if people can see your friends or your fan pages? Well, in a word: yes. A friend of mine is considering deleting his Facebook account now because of a stalker that has been following him for ten years. He'd been able to avoid her on Facebook, but now she will be able to track him down. People can get into hot water at work over joining certain political or religious fan pages, or naughty ones, for instance. And the FBI has a special data mining unit for sites like Facebook. If you're not worried about that, you should be.

Not only might it lead to embarrassment at work or scuttle a potential job search, but it's rather obvious to me that Facebook has done this as a calculated risk. And this is the real reason behind all this. They are risking angering a percentage of their users because they want to make this juicy demographic information available to advertisers and app developers. New studies are showing that Facebook and Twitter have a big impact on sales, and we're only beginning to understand how companies and individuals are using personal information mined from social networking sites to target advertising and exploit users.

Not only that, but not all app developers have harmless intentions, and with the privacy changes came another big blow to privacy regarding apps. Previously, one was able to block all apps from the Facebook API from pulling data about you. Now your information is public, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Facebook says that a small percentage of their users were using the privacy controls - but even if it were one percent, that's still 3 million people. That's a lot of people who just had the rug pulled from under them.

Particularly problematic is that this major change was rolled out without a word about it beforehand. Just a big bomb dropped and no way around it. There were weeks of discussion about privacy policy changes, but nobody mentioned this major detail about previously private information becoming public, about control being taken away from one's own profile, or about no longer being able to block all applications from using your data. Just gone, all of it. In one fell swoop. With no warning.

So what should you do?

In the short term, I've deleted all of my fan pages (out of fairness - some of them were started by friends and I figured if I was going to delete one I would delete them all, so data couldn't be mined from my newly exposed interests) and gone through and made everything as private as possible, including using a picture that doesn't have my face in it. 

What else can you do? Complain. Complain to Facebook. Look for another social network that will give you more privacy, and invite all your friends there, and dump your Facebook profile. Write to media outlets and let them know what's going on, and that you and a lot of other people are angry about it. Unless Facebook starts to get some really bad press about this, they aren't going to do anything other than thumb their nose as they count their cold, hard cash.

UPDATE: Think I'm ringing too many alarms about this? Gawker has a rather chilling example today of how the new Facebook policy can be used against people by those who want to make trouble: a friends list published for the purposes of hate mailing. (Thanks to Bonnie Russell for the tip.)

UPDATE #2: Some friends and I have been experimenting with different changes to see how private we can really be. I decided to hide my gender by deleting it, but now am frequently beset with a pop-up asking me whether I want to be referred to as "his" or "her." I close it, and it comes back periodically. Selecting this would broadcast that information (which would be considered public), which would presumably be most valuable to targeted advertising. I'll keep not answering the question, but I wonder how long it will keep going on.