What’s up with Facebook now? Well, today the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a cyber-privacy civil rights group, has filed a formal complaint against the recent Facebook changes to their privacy settings and policy. Here is EPIC’s press release and here is their complaint.

My advice: Drop Facebook like a bad habit unless you post to Facebook only information that you generally post the Web and seriously do not care if everyone sees. Keep in mind that none of Facebook’s changes were put in place to help users. The financial reason for the changes was to open all users’ information in order for Facebook to more effectively compete against Twitter for searchable information. The more information that you post that gets indexed by the search engines, the more traffic there is to Facebook and the more advertisements they can sell. They are selling you and everything you say and post, even though you signed up to share information only with your friends. Is this the way to build a legitimate business? Is this a business that exhibits the kind of customer protection you want to share your private information with?

Did you know that under the new settings a listing of your Facebook friends is shared with the entire Internet unless you take special action?

Check out this article from MSNBC highlighting the fact that even Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, could not correctly apply the new settings.

If Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg can’t figure out his social networking site’s privacy settings after they were ripped open earlier this month, what hope is there for the rest of us?

For a brief window of time, the whole world had an opening to check out (and get screen grabs) of Zuckerberg’s previously private Facebook photos, in which the young CEO is seen, as Valleywag describes, “shirtless, romantic, clutching a teddy bear, and looking plastered.”

Do you want someone to be able to search for you and get your picture, your location and a list of your online friends and their pictures and names? Do your friends want you to to do this? At a minimum, do what is recommended in the MSNBC article linked above.

Still don’t believe me? Well, your Facebook profile will show friends faces and names to a user not on Facebook (i.e., Google) if your settings otherwise are at the highest privacy settings allowed with Facebook “search results” set to “only friends” but “public search” approved.

I am willing to wager to virtually all Facebook users are now sharing friends names and pictures with the universe. Is this what you think you agreed to? When you turn off this behavior, this is the ominous “warning” you are shown by Facebook: