the process is far from straightforward

the process is far from straightforward Facebook has become the focus of an increasingly heated electrical motordebate over whether it was keeping its end of the bargain and giving users an easy, straightforward and consistent way to set their limits. It has regularly revised its privacy settings, made them harder to find and massaged the way it describes the meaning of privacy. Leaving Facebook for good is a complex chore.

These are legitimate concerns. After a public outcry, Facebook is responding to them by revising some of its privacy policies.

Last month, the company caused an uproar among privacy advocates and attracted the scrutiny of lawmakers when it redefined many items on users’ profiles — including friends, current city and job, their school, listed interests and Web sites they liked — as public information, broadly visible on topical pages and accessible by applications running on Facebook. It did not matter how private users wanted to keep the information.

Facebook also started a program allowing Web sites to access the public information of users who clicked Facebook “like” buttons and another to share users’ public information with corporate partners such as Yelp and Pandora to allow them to personalize their services to users’ tastes. Users can opt out, but the process is far from straightforward.

On Monday, Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, announced in an op-ed article in The Washington Post that over the next several months the company would “add privacy controls that are much simpler to use,” and “give you an easy way to turn off all third-party services.” The company added that it would trim the information considered public by default. That would be the right decision for a company that has become a powerful force in the way people communicate online.

Last year, following another consumer backlash over changes to its terms of service, Facebook introduced a set of principles that included this: “People should have the freedom to decide with whom they will share their information, and to set privacy controls to protect those choices.” Facebook would do well to abide by this rule.