I’m a Facebook junkie. I’ll admit it again. I’ve written about Facebook’s privacy issues before, but since then there’s even more information that has come to light that everyone should be aware of. This stuff is just a nightmare for privacy advocates.

Before last week, it seemed that all I needed to worry about in order to protect my privacy was to ensure I don’t install too many (if any) of those third-party applications that so many Facebook users love to add to their profile. This is because Facebook shares all of our personal information with all of the developers of the applications we’re addicted to.

Scrabulous, anyone? Oh yes, and as I’ve spoken about before, we must ensure we don’t provide too much personal information on our profiles. But now, it seems like anything we do to maintain our privacy is pretty much out the window. Facebook's Web site, as well as their overlong application terms of service, conveniently fail to mention something rather important. Along with providing the application developer access to most of your private profile data, you also agree to allow the developer to see private data on all of your friends too.

Most Facebook users set their profiles to private, which stops anyone but their friends from seeing their profile details. This is a great privacy feature that can protect users from cyber stalkers. Great! But this activity is rendered completely useless by the application system. To reiterate: if you set your profile to private, and any one of your friends adds an application, most of your profile information that is visible to your friend is also available to that application developer, even if you yourself have not installed the application.

The (maybe) good news is that Facebook lets you configure how much of your own private data that your friend's applications can see. The bad news is not only is it hidden away, requiring several clicks through menus to find a page listing specific privacy settings (Privacy/Applications/Other Applications), but to most users, it’s not even accessible. It’s greyed out! Ouch. Worse, the default values are extremely lax, where any user who has yet to discover the preference page is essentially sharing their entire profile by default.

This friend data-sharing element, and the ability to protect against it, isn't mentioned anywhere else on Facebook's site, nor are users informed about it when they install an application. Chris Kelly, Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer, was actually quoted as saying: "We have made things very clear to users, and they understand it very well." In the interview I read, Facebook was being very evasive about any of these privacy issues. I also recall an episode of Sixty Minutes last month where Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. When asked about previous privacy concerns, he as well was very ambiguous with his responses.

I get the feeling Facebook doesn’t take these privacy issues seriously. But their reasons for not doing so are not at all malicious. Their attitude is probably something like: “If our customers really don’t care about privacy, why should we?” And they wouldn’t be at all mistaken. People add applications with no regard whatsoever for their privacy. Hey, if something’s really cool, who cares what they have to give up to get that immediate satisfaction?

Yes, Facebook is evil, but not evil enough to stop me from using it. Plus, all my silly-application loving friends have already inadvertently shared my information, which is (thankfully) quite limited. I just can’t give up my online Scrabble games!