This Sunday, Chuck Schumer (Democrat Senator from New York) held a press conference around a letter he wrote to the FTC asking for regulation around privacy settings on social networks. From TheHill:

"Hundreds of millions of people use social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace and Twitter every day," Schumer said. "These sites have helped reconnect old friends, allow families from far away to stay in touch, and created new friendships; overall they provide a great new way to communicate. As these sites become more and more popular, however, it’s vitally important that safeguards are in place that provide users with control over their personal information to ensure they don’t receive unwanted solicitations."

According to TheHill, Facebook responded quickly:

We were surprised by Senator Schumer’s comments and look forward to sitting down with him and his staff to clarify. We think these programs will make surfing the web a smoother and more engaging experience for people who use Facebook while honoring the trust we’ve been given.

Facebook fails to realize that the problem with their privacy settings isn’t that they’re not there, it’s that they’re obscure and difficult to manage. I stood up for Google when Buzz received the same sort of reception from the public.  When people at large can’t understand how to change their privacy settings, they might as well not even be there.

Last week, Leo Laporte posted a one sentence item to his Google Buzz public timeline: “I wish I had the time to write a blog post: Why you will never see the Facebook Like button on anything I do.” On that thread, John David Francis had a thoughtful addition to the highly populated thread:

As soon as you start complaining about Facebook, someone always mentions Google and several people in here have done so. Has Google made some mistakes in terms of privacy? Sure. Have they consistently tried to make amends for those breaches? Definitely. I use Buzz and have a Google profile because I have granular control of over my data. What gets seen and what doesn’t. Google makes it easy to set this stuff and it’s fairly black and white. Facebook’s settings are one part mysticism, one part confusion, and three parts misdirection.

Essentially, the problem is that clicking the settings button and figuring out how everything works is boring. If it weren’t that boring, it wouldn’t be confusing.

It doesn’t have to be that way.  When Michael Sean Wright and I were discussing this same imbroglio in Austin with Louis Gray after the Cube taping one day, it suddenly occurred to me that there is one example in the world of geekdom where clicking endlessly through menus is something not laborious at all, but something strived for: Final Fantasy.

Since the inception of the uber-popular game franchise, Final Fantasy has sold over 59 million copies (not including the latest release, Final Fantasy XIII, for which sales records have not yet been released, or spinoff games, cousins of the series like Tactics or Xenogears). If you’ve never played the game, it’s essentially an assembly of endless menus and settings that culminate in beautifully orchestrated cutscenes, dialogues, and attack animations.

I don’t have a well assembled list of things in my head that make the Final Fantasy games so attractive. I know why I like them: they always have superiour and engaging stories and beautiful graphics to go with them. I’ve never really minded the endless settings screens, and indeed, that customization is part of the charm.

It’s a charm that hasn’t carried over to Facebook and Google, since those are the stuffs that User Revolts are made from. We need to address this problem before the government does – the last thing we need is the FTC hamfistedly addressing even more social media issues.