Most people would let out a huge groan if they were told Hollywood’s latest idea was to make a movie about Facebook. But with David Fincher directing (Se7en, Fight Club), Aaron Sorkin writing (A Few Good Men, West Wing), Jesse Eisenberg starring (Adventureland, Zombieland), Justin Timberlake co-starring (the funny guy from SNL) and Trent Reznor doing the music (Nine Inch Nails) this film is something to get very excited about.

The movie is based on the best selling book with the same title (The Social Network actually the book is called “Accidental Billionaires”), but is going to be known as “the facebook movie” to most people. What excites me even more than the possibility of something good to see in theaters is the knowledge that at least a few people are going to give my Why I Quit Facebook post another read.

What do you think? Does this sound like a recipe for a hit? Getting excited?

Facebook has turned into a total privacy nightmare. What’s worse is that privacy has disappeared as Facebook’s market share has increased. Boing Boing shows a brief timeline of how this has happened. I’ve added the image below.

As Facebook’s power has grown, so has their disregard for privacy. Definitely a disturbing trend. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had to settle a huge lawsuit surrounding accusations of ripping off the idea from fellow Harvard students he ripped off. I won’t get into the details around the lawsuit, but there is information out there if you are curious.

Recently a college friend of Zuckerberg’s released instant messages to Business Insider. Below are some of the messages, keep in mind this was when he was a poor college student running a web site out of his dorm room. Now his net worth is estimated to be in the neighborhood of five billion dollars.

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

Zuck: Just ask.

Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How’d you manage that one?

Zuck: People just submitted it.

Zuck: I don’t know why.

Zuck: They “trust me”

Zuck: Dumb fucks.

Not the best track record so far, but how about some more specifics about these privacy “changes” as Facebook is calling them. A blogger named Matt McKeon came up with a great animation to show the growing availability of personal information. You can see the progression on his blog, below are images showing the difference between 2005 and 2010.

Facebook today isn’t what I signed up for back in 2005. I understand that you should take precautions putting information online assuming it will be private, but this is ridiculous. My problem is less with the erosion of privacy and more with Facebook’s approach. Instead of making all of this sharing and instant personalization (previous post on this alarming “feature”) features users can opt-in to, they have made it so there are choices buried within the options allowing you to opt-out. That is, if you actually know Facebook has changed the options. With each major update, they routinely attempt to reset user’s options to the defaults. No surprise here, but the defaults involve everything being public.

Just how confusing have these options become? The New York Times has a great interactive feature highlighting the complexity. Some of the interesting highlights include Facebook’s privacy policy being longer than the U.S. Constitution and the tidbit that even if you have made your account totally private, your friends can still share all of your information with others.

Facebook has had a ton of security exploits. Most recently, users were able to witness live chat between other members without their knowledge. Another security issue resulted in private messages being randomly send to different users. What would you say if your e-mail account did this one day? It’s also now in the top ten of most target sites for phishing according to Mashable.

What about Google and all the other companies we are sharing all of our information with? It’s easy. None of those groups are basing entire business plans around making all of your information public. None of those companies have a track record of screwing people over. None of those companies have had privacy violations anywhere close to the scope of those made by Facebook. Google is quickly emerging as the largest rival to Facebook. Google represents the open, transparent web, while Facebook wants a closed system they control.

Think about everything that has been said here so far about Facebook. Here is a quick story about Google for comparison. Google’s company motto is “do no evil.” The Chinese government hacked into gmail to find out information about known political dissidents. Google decided this was the final straw and stopped censoring search results in China even though the popular search engine is now blocked by the great firewall of China as a result. The Google founders decided standing up for what they believed in was more important than becoming a major player in a market worth billions. What would Zuckerberg have done in this situation? It’s ok to share information on the internet, it’s the future of the web, just be careful who you share it with.

The bottom line is that Facebook has gone too far and have done absolutely nothing which would make me believe they are suddenly going to do otherwise. You have a choice, by doing nothing you have made one.

Facebook just made some major announcements that not only change the course of the world’s most trafficked web site, but change the course of the internet itself. Unfortunately, these changes also raise serious privacy concerns. The vast majority of Facebook users will not notice, which is sad. This isn’t the first time Facebook has made major changes to their privacy policy, but these changes bigger implications than any changes made in the past.

Remember those Facebook Connect buttons? They are going to start disappearing. In place of those buttons will be innocent looking “like” buttons. Facebook wants you to “like” (recommend / share) an article, a photo or a product. “Liking” something will automatically post it to your feed. You cannot remove these items on your feed from Facebook, instead you must go back to the web site where you hit the like button and click it again to unlike the item. On top of that, these likes do not have privacy settings. They are viewable by every single Facebook user forever.

The other major change concerns applications. It used to be that applications had access to all of your personal data for only 24 hours. Now they have access to it forever. For all those MafiaWars and Farmville players out there, you better hope you are ok with companies having access to your personal data in exchange for playing their games. On top of that, your friends can share your information to applications. Below is a list of all the things friends can share about you.

Most of these changes are not that bad. What makes them really bad is the average user’s ignorance of their existence. Facebook gives you a small notice at the top of your page the next time you login. It’s pretty misleading.

It used to be that you could fairly safely assume you were surfing the internet anonymously. Now Facebook is turning into your digital fingerprint. You might not be aware of all the places you are leaving your fingerprints, but someone certainly is watching, monitoring and recording. Instant Personalization is only available on Yelp, Microsoft Doc.com and Pandora for the time being, but the feature is definitely going to expand to other places.

If you want to disable Instant Personalization, go to Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites and then uncheck the box at the bottom.

The most important thing you can do is take some serious time to look through all of your privacy settings and the information you’ve written in your profile. You can no longer assume only your friends will be looking at your profile.

Facebook is rapidly becoming a web site I spend less and less time on, but this post isn’t about those reasons. It is about 20 Facebook Tips you might not know. Specifically #2 on the list. Did you know there was a firefox addon that automatically downloaded albums? Neither did I. This is going to save me a lot of time asking friends for copies of pictures from events where I neglected to bring my camera.

According to multiple sources, Facebook is moving ahead with plans to exploit private user data for advertisement targeting. Straight from to the Telegraph:

Facebook is planning to exploit the vast amount of personal information it holds on its 150m members by creating one of the world’s largest market research databases.

Rumors are going around that despite the web site being valued in the billions, cash reserves on running low and they are desperately trying to find ways to increase advertising revenue. It is believed that a deal has already been reached with careerbuilder.com. Don’t worry, there is a little hope:

All the company’s previous attempts to monetise the site have failed after members railed against the site’s invasion of their privacy. Mr Zuckerberg pulled Beacon, a service that notified users of their friends’ purchases on external sites such as Amazon, after members launched a campaign in December 2007.

Read the full story from The Telegraph.

Update: Facebook has started a PR blitz to confront the backlash from users. One source is saying Facebook is telling them they are no longer going forward with plans.

I’m not sure what I think about the new design. Some good things, some bad things. Mainly less clutter, which I like. The applications were getting a bit out of control and now they have been scaled back a lot. Regardless of what I think, try it out for yourself by going here.

Update: There is also an AP Article if you want to know more.