Facebook to Offer Better Privacy Controls; We Don’t Believe Them [Facebook Said to Reveal New Privacy Menu Tomorrow, Will Facebook Privacy be Really Private?]

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I can’t wait for Diaspora to come out, you know, that new social networking service that’s supposed to keep our private lives really private even when sharing them with our friends. But until that happens we’re really interested to see what will Facebook do next in order to further harm our privacy.

Right now it looks like the company has listened to all those voices complaining that Facebook has, time and time again, removed privacy layers in order to make as much money as possible from advertisers interested in our private details, and, starting tomorrow, we’ll have a better Facebook menu to manage our privacy settings.

Believe it or not, managing your privacy settings is not such an easy task and so many Facebook users have complained about this particular menu. That menu is now said to be a lot simpler, as it should be, but we have no idea what has really changed. Starting tomorrow we’ll be able to play with our privacy settings thanks to this new, replacement menu, coming out, but will that really fix the earlier problems? I mean, hasn’t our privacy already been breached so many times? How would a new settings menu repair Facebook’s wrong doings from the past.

The current menu has 50 settings with more than 170 different choices and it will be interesting to see how many options we’ll have starting tomorrow.

But here’s what Facebook’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, said about Facebook’s principles just yesterday:

Here are the principles under which Facebook operates:

• You have control over how your information is shared.
• We do not share your personal information with people or services you don’t want.
• We do not give advertisers access to your personal information.
• We do not and never will sell any of your information to anyone.
• We will always keep Facebook a free service for everyone.

We definitely can’t argue with these principles and we can only hope that’s exactly how things are. But are they really respected? We’ll be looking forward to hear how you find the new privacy settings so hit us with comments once Facebook rolls out the new menu.