Facebook hasn't always managed its users' data well. In the beginning, it restricted the visibility of a user's personal information to just their friends and their "network" (college or school). Over the past couple of years, the default privacy settings for a Facebook user's personal information have become more and more permissive. They've also changed how your personal information is classified several times, sometimes in a manner that has been confusing for their users. This has largely been part of Facebook's effort to correlate, publish, and monetize their social graph: a massive database of entities and links that covers everything from where you live to the movies you like and the people you trust.
This blog post by Kurt Opsahl at the the EFF gives a brief timeline of Facebook's Terms of Service changes through April of 2010. It's a great overview, but I was a little disappointed it wasn't an actual timeline: hence my initial inspiration for this infographic.
Let me be clear about something: I like Facebook. It's helped me reconnect with dozens of people with whom I'd lost touch, and I admire the work their team does. I hope your takeaway from this infographic isn't "I'm deleting my account"; rather, I hope it's "I'm checking my privacy settings right now, and changing them to a level with which I'm comfortable".
