Facebook's privacy settings are baffling

Today I've been spending quite a bit of time going over my Facebook privacy settings, something that I always find slightly baffling.

Despite Facebook claiming that their privacy settings are clear and easy to tweak and customise, I consistently find them to be a veritable minefield of hidden options, confusingly worded explanations and bewildering menus and sub-menus.

My latest journey deep into my Facebook privacy settings comes after a colleague pointed out to me something called ‘Instant Personalisation'. In fact, there's a very interesting Computeractive blog on that which you can read here. All I wanted to do was make sense of my privacy settings...but it really isn't easy.

There are some interesting ‘quirks' to Facebook's security settings, a couple of which I'll be outlining below...

Facebook privacy 'quirks'

First up, application privacy; just what do apps know about you and your friends? Well, quite a bit really:

To be fair, Facebook do make it clear when you install an app onto your profile that it will know certain things about you. You can then make an informed choice based on the information given. But that isn't the concerning part. At the bottom of the image above it says 'Access my friends' information' (which is required) and then lists a rather large number of things.

Personally, I don't tend to install/use apps on my Facebook profile, but a lot of my friends do. Without really knowing it, all the applications and games my friends use could access a wealth of my personal information. Needless to say, I've now turned this off as it wasn't something I was comfortable with.

Did I select that?

The image below details what additional information from my profile could have been accessed by apps, games and websites installed and used by my friends on Facebook. I'm not quite sure why 'My website' and 'Places I check in to' were selected, I don't ever remember being into this settings screen. At the bottom of this window it says:

Your name, profile picture, gender, networks and user ID (along with any other information you've set to everyone) is available to friends' applications unless you turn off platform applications and websites.

How do you do that? It doesn't say. Admittedly this setting is on the main screen for application privacy and is easy to turn off, but the lack of clarity as to how to do things is frustrating and unnecessary.

What's clear to me is how unclear the privacy settings are on Facebook. And they only seem to get more confusing.

There are other oddities too. I couldn't check what videos other people could view when checking profile preview and there is no way to edit individual viewing rights for videos from inside privacy settings (it can only be done by going to an individual video and editing the settings there). And then, this has just popped up:

The confusion continues.