With this move, Facebook is turning many of your before-private profile fields into now-public "Page" connections. Any most users don't realize by clicking that blue button they are making everything public.
I was actually really annoyed by Facebook's new linking of profile items, but not at all because of privacy issues. (I really don't care if anyone sees the things I put on Facebook).<p>I initially chose NOT to link any of my profile interests to their respective pages. I have no problem giving Facebook data for their open graph project; my fear was that I would soon be inundated with dozens of news feed items from all of my interests' Pages. So I unchecked all the items that had been on my profile for several years, thinking that they would still be displayed as simple text (as opposed to links).<p>Instead, they were all deleted! So I took some time to (partially) rebuild my list of interests as links, only to then of course witness the flood of news items posted by those pages. I have been 'hiding' them as they show up. Hiss.
What this article doesn't really clarify is that the author kept picking "Ask me later" in the dialog for the suggestions. It doesn't really make sense for Facebook to just keep letting you "snooze" that transition [keeping all data in two formats, maintaining two Profile formats, more headaches] -- which is why, the fifth time or so you see the dialog, it wants you to make a decision.<p>[I work for Facebook. My opinions are my own.]
Do you guys list a series of illegal activities as public interests on Facebook or something? Google's lack of privacy boundaries are much more disconcerting than this -- "Orwellian" seems to imply one being watched, which Facebook is not doing; you are publishing it yourself, <i>to the Internet</i>. This is just an example of poor UI design.
They were already linked.... but to a search field.... Now they are just linking to a fan page which pulls content from Wikipedia.<p>And it used to news feed them when you changed them anyway ("XX has changed their television interests" or something to that extent)
Much as I love complaining about Facebook, the fact that they accurately derived the pages to be linked to means they already have this information. In fact I'm not even sure why they bother to ask.