In the way of a great illusionist, this week Facebook got so many users worked up about the loss of easy access to recent posts that they were able to slide in much more significant changes that altered the privacy control that every Facebook user had over his own information.
Yes, you can establish the privacy of photos and status updates on the fly now, but if your friends choose to share your information on their own profiles, your friends' friends and the apps they use have access to it.
See here:
In the past, your privacy settings controlled who could see your posts, but the above statement leads me to wonder if that remains the case if friends can freely share your updates, photos and information with their friends.
However, you can still stop apps from accessing your info. So it is more important than ever to restrict which of your personal information your friends' apps can access. See here:
If any of the above boxes are checked, your friends are sharing that information with the apps they use. And yes, they are checked by default. Pretty slick, don't you think?
Access this screen here:
Home > Privacy > Apps and Websites > How people bring your info to apps they use.
Keep in mind that Facebook makes money from those apps, and those apps are only free because they benefit from collecting users' information.
So, did Facebook deliberately compromise user experience to take attention off a significant and deliberate privacy reduction? We'll never know for sure. But users world-wide sure took their eye off the ball and focused on usability instead of privacy issues this week.
Few users realize that Facebook doesn't give a hoot about our privacy, despite their claims to the contrary. Facebook is in business to make money. If they're not charging you to use the service, the money has to come from somewhere. Bottom line: the more info Facebook can get you to provide, the more valuable its database is to advertisers and apps. Remember, you are a user; advertisers and app developers are its customers. That's a very important distinction.

I recently stumbled upon a very good article about marketing during a recession. It was published in 