There is some controversy, including a critique from our team at the EFF of Facebook's new privacy structure, and their new default and suggested policies that push people to expose more of their profile and data to "everyone."

I understand why Facebook finds this attractive. "Everyone" means search engines like Google, and also total 3rd party apps like those that sprung up around Twitter.

On Twitter, I tried to have a "protected" profile, open only to friends, but that's far from the norm there. And it turns out it doesn't work particularly well. Because twitter is mostly exposed to public view, all sorts of things started appearing to treat twitter as more a micro blogging platform than a way to share short missives with friends. All of these new functions didn't work on a protected account. With a protected account, you could not even publicly reply to people who did not follow you. Even the Facebook app that imports your tweets to Facebook doesn't work on protected accounts, though it certainly could.

Worse, many people try to use twitter as a "backchannel" for comments about events like conferences. I think it's dreadful as a backchannel, and conferences encourage it mostly as a form of spam: when people tweet to one another about the conference, they are also flooding the outside world with constant reminders about the conference. To use the backchannel though, you put in tags and generally this is for the whole world to see, not just your followers. People on twitter want to be seen.

Not so on Facebook and it must be starting to scare them. On Facebook, for all its privacy issues, mainly you are seen by your friends. Well, and all those annoying apps that, just to use them, need to know everything about you. You disclose a lot more to Facebook than you do to Twitter and so it's scary to see a push to make it more public.

Being public means that search engines will find material, and that's hugely important commercially, even to a site as successful as Facebook. Most sites in the world are disturbed to learn they get a huge fraction of their traffic from search engines. Facebook is an exception but doesn't want to be. It wants to get all the traffic it gets now, plus more.

And then there's the cool 3rd party stuff. Facebook of course has its platform, and that platform has serious privacy issues, but at least Facebook has some control over it, and makes the "apps" (really embedded 3rd party web sites) agree to terms. But you can't beat the innovation that comes from having less controlled entrepreneurs doing things, and that's what happens on twitter. Facebook doesn't want to be left behind.

What's disturbing about this is the idea that we will see sites starting to feel that abandoning or abusing privacy gives them a competitive edge. We used to always hope that sites would see protecting their users' privacy as a competitive edge, but the reverse could take place, which would be a disaster.

Is there an answer? It may be to try to build applications in more complex ways that still protect privacy. Though in the end, you can't do that if search engines are going to spider your secrets in order to do useful things with them; at least not the way search engines work today.