• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, December 17, 2009

Consumer advocates have asked the Federal Trade Commission to order Facebook to bring back its former privacy settings.

In a complaint filed Thursday, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and nine other groups allege that Facebook's controversial new privacy settings "violate user expectations, diminish user privacy, and contradict Facebook's own representations." The advocacy organizations, including The Center for Digital Democracy, Consumer Federation of America and the American Library Association, say that Facebook's change in terms are a deceptive and unfair business practice.

"We fully respect that some people want to be fully public, which is fine, but other people need gradations of privacy and Facebook has made it more difficult for people who need those gradations to keep them," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the EPIC.

Last week, Facebook unveiled new privacy settings that for the first time, classify a host of data as "publicly available information." Included in that category are users' names, profile pictures, cities, networks, lists of friends and pages people are fans of.

Facebook users can still avoid displaying their friends lists, but the controls to do so are no longer located with the other privacy settings. Instead, people who want to keep the names of their friends from appearing must go to the profile section, click on an icon next to their friend list, and uncheck the "show my friends on my profile" box.

Even when Facebook users complete that procedure, application developers nonetheless have access to all "publicly available information" about users.

Privacy advocates say these changes potentially harm people because information about their friends can be used for questionable purposes. For instance, the complaint references MIT's "gaydar" research, which involved figuring out who was gay based on their Facebook friends.

Another area of contention involves the default settings. When Facebook rolled out its revised privacy controls, it asked members to review their settings, but also changed most defaults to share-with-everyone. The upshot was that some members who previously restricted access to their pictures, status updates and other information are now giving all Web users access to it.

Rotenberg says this shift wasn't fair to Facebook's members. "It's a little bit like opting out of a list, and then having the company opt you back in and saying, 'Well you can just opt out again,'" he says.

Privacy advocate Jeff Chester, executive director of The Center for Digital Democracy, says he's particularly troubled by Facebook's share-everything default standard. "Facebook is boldly redefining the concept of privacy for all Americans," he said. "Facebook is consciously devaluing the notion of privacy for its own interests."

A Facebook spokesperson said the company met with outside parties, including the FTC, before revising its privacy settings. "We've had productive discussions with dozens of organizations around the world about the recent changes and we're disappointed that EPIC has chosen to share their concerns with the FTC while refusing to talk to us about them," a spokesperson said.

Rotenberg said that his organization met with Facebook on Wednesday for over an hour. "I walked out of the meeting and concluded that they didn't understand," Rotenberg said.