When I was a child growing up in New England, we had a saying: If you don’t like the weather, wait a minute. The same, it seems, can be said for Facebook’s privacy policies. Barely 4 weeks ago, Facebook announced their new open graph platform that follows you across the web – a privacy policy that seems based on the less (privacy) is more (revenue) principle. A mere 4 months earlier, Facebook announced sweeping privacy policy changes that users found beyond confusing. And a few months before that Facebook announced privacy policy changes that allowed developers to mine your Facebook inbox for data! And now, just today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced yet another change to Facebook’s privacy policies and Facebook privacy settings system, this one, he promises, “making control simple.”

Facebook – the site that changes its interface, services, and values almost as often as we change our underwear (hint: daily), has once again announced a major change that affects all Facebook users – and users of other services – in a major way. This week’s announcement is that Facebook is now sharing it’s new “like” system with partners like Microsoft Fuse Docs, Pandora, and Yelp – and any other site that wants to feature the new Facebook social plugins – creating what Facebook calls a “social graph” or “open graph”. This means that when you “like” something on Facebook, that “like” will follow you around to Pandora, Yelp, and Microsoft Fuse Docs – and vice versa. The good news is that you can opt out of it (and we tell you how).