So we’ve all been hearing about the major backlash against facebook’s unilateral changes in privacy settings this last few weeks.

So I set out to un-do all the facebook changes that were made without my approval. I read through NY Daily News’s post that gives 6 excellent steps for how to opt out of instant personalization and other sneaky facebook features.

 But then I realized that I was reading my facebook directions in English! I have my facebook language as Spanish so everything should be in spanish.

The privacy settings should be translated in Spanish! The only sections in spanish were the headings and the “no gracias” in the privacy opt-out explanation. Come on Facebook! Your spanish speakers are just as important as your english speakers!

And when I changed my language to Mandarin, the same thing! none of the privacy settings for instant personalization were in Mandarin.

I stopped this experiment after Mandarin, but I think that I can safely assume that it’s other 100+ languages were also untranslated for this privacy setting. 

Come on really facebook? really? Your privacy policy and settings are so important that you cannot wait to crowd source your users to translate it for you! This is yet another barrier for users to engage in self-defined privacy settings. What does this say about how Facebook values its non-English speakers? Not very much. 

I would think for a company like facebook that has been built on trust that they would make privacy as one of the most important things to NOT screw up.

Social groups can be range from being super resilient or fragile. With so many privacy oversights, I wonder what is going on inside facebook and if they are seriously talking to their resident sociologist, Cameron Marlow. Connecting with contacts can be contagious, but so can leaving a network when people start getting frustrated. 

Check out danah boyd’s awesome rant on facebook privacy and her talk on privacy at SXSW. 

And learn how to reclaim your facebook privacy settings. Thanks Wouter Bron for the tip!