It’s no big headline that Facebook has grown massively since first being launched in 2005 as a portal for students at Harvard. Much of this growth is obviously due to the fact that Facebook continued to open its platform up to new users –  first students at other colleges, then high schools, and eventually to anyone with internet access. As their user base grew, marketers started to raise their brows. Facebook can now boast mind boggling stats about their users and has recently surpassed Google as the most visited homepage on the web.

That’s incredible. But what is also incredible is how rapidly Facebook has been changing its privacy settings to make their users’ info ever more public to increase the value of their advertising products.

These charts, created by Matt McKeon and recently featured in Fast Company, provide an incredibly vivid illustration of just how much Facebook has been chipping away at our privacy since its launch five years ago.

In 2005:

In 2009:

Now:

As the Fast Company article points out these are the default settings and you can certainly change them if you are concerned, but the point remains that Facebook is pushing to make your information ever more public and you must play a far more active role in protecting your content then you did in the past. This can particularly become a concern for Facebook’s younger users who studies have shown do care about privacy but  as Ken Denmead said in one of his GeekDad articles often “lack the tools and knowledge to make technologically complex privacy decisions”.

How do you feel about Facebook’s ever changing privacy settings? Are you concerned about the direction of this trend, or do you agree with Mark Zuckerberg that the age of privacy is over?