Continuing our coverage of the recent changes to Facebook, let’s talk about the Open Graph, announced by Mark Zuckerberg yesterday at F8 and elaborated upon in a recent blog article. It’s also buzzing around the blogosphere and mainstream media outlets as they all try to figure out exactly what’s going on.

Here’s what we know:

1) Facebook will allow partner sites to detect your information and “personalize” your web experience.

If you’re logged in to Facebook, third-party websites will be able to detect that (though not your personal information directly) and allow Facebook to integrate their content with your social network.

Here are some examples of what your corner of the Internet may look like soon:

From the Washington Post:

From Facebook:

2) It’s not clear how the Open Graph will respect user privacy preferences.

Now, in some ways, the Open Graph is less intrusive than it may feel at first. It appears that it will only share information when you actively Share (rather than merely visit) a site. In this way, it appears to be space-shifting the Share/News Feed/Posted Items functionality from the News Feed to the site where the content is actually located. While this is certainly a big difference – location matters in privacy – it is not a major shift.

What could be a major shift is to what degree the Open Graph respects user privacy preferences. It seems fairly clear that if you are not Friends with another Facebook user, your Sharing of a story is represented as one of the nameless, faceless number that has anonymously recommended or Liked content, and if you are Friends with another user, your face and/or name may appear beside that number as well.

The question is: will the Open Graph respect Friends Lists? Suppose a user creates a Friends List labeled “Scrubbed” to which they assign bosses, subordinates, relatives, etc – the sort of people that you have to Friend to be polite but may not want having full access to your profile. And suppose the “Scrubbed” List cannot see status updates / shared content / posted links.

Will someone on a Scrubbed list be able to see your name or face next to the shared data? Or will the social system be smart enough to know that it shouldn’t show it?

This is a critical question because its answer has a huge affect on the privacy people can experience across the entire Internet.

3) Pulling Teeth – Or Personal Information, Anyway.

If you read Facebook’s introduction to their new system, you’ll see a note tucked away in the bottom right hand side of the page:

You can easily opt-out of experiencing this on these sites by clicking here or clicking “No Thanks” on the blue Facebook notification on the top of partner sites. If you opt-out, your public Facebook information can still be shared by your friends to these partner sites unless you block the application.

Emphasis added. Facebook not only opts you in to this service, it opts you in via your Friends as an extra backdoor to your content.

Now, you can go to this page and limit what sort of information your Friends can share about you. However, Facebook has killed your control here too:

When your friend visits a Facebook-enhanced application or website, they may want to share certain information to make the experience more social. For example, a greeting card application may use your birthday information to prompt your friend to send a card

If your friend uses an application that you do not use, you can control what types of information the application can access. Please note that applications will always be able to access your publicly available information (Name, Profile Picture, Gender, Current City, Networks, Friend List, and Pages) and information that is visible to Everyone.

Emphasis added.

Facebook, in other words, has specifically revoked your ability to control what information is available to third parties. These include internationally acknowledged private data like gender.

Without wishing to sound hyperbolic, this is madness, and this is loathsome. Not a single shred of support can be mustered by Facebook (or anyone else) to argue that this change is good for users. Facebook has not only designed the defaults of their site to be deeply confusing, counterintuitive, and antithetical to privacy norms, they have revoked the ability of users to control certain information at all. We challenge Facebook to tell the Facebook community how or why these changes benefit them, and why they are not allowing users to control these data.

Here is the bottom line:

Facebook has designed its system to screw over its users. It is inexcusable, it is intentional, and it must be stopped.