BoingBoing introduced the EFF’s sobering timeline of the evolution of Facebook’s ‘privacy’ policy between 2005 and 2012 thus:

Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Kurt Opsahl has gone spelunking in the history of Facebook’s privacy policies over the past five years, presenting a timeline that starts with something fairly moderate and reasonable in 2005 and moves to the … 2010 version which basically says, “By using Facebook, you agree to let us film your life 24/7, sell it to advertisers, ridicule it, or make a reality show from it.”

As Kurt says, “Viewed together, the successive policies tell a clear story. Facebook originally earned its core base of users by offering them simple and powerful controls over their personal information. As Facebook grew larger and became more important, it could have chosen to maintain or improve those controls. Instead, it’s slowly but surely helped itself — and its advertising and business partners — to more and more of its users’ information, while limiting the users’ options to control their own information.”