I agree only a small percentage care about privacy settings. The majority probably just wants "private" or "public". I also agree it's fine to piss off a small percentage of users. This has absolutely nothing to do with that. My problem is, if only a small percentage of users care about privacy why dont they keep the controls simple like Twitter? Private or public. It keeps it simple and makes engineering FB even easier. "Is user set to private?" would be the only thing they need.
They do it so, for the people who want they're profile private (which a lot of users have at least part of their profiles private), they can circumvent it. For example:
- Personal info privacy
- Pictures Privacy
- Timeline Privacy
- Some other feature privacy
Now, for example, 2 months later they add some feature that automatically posts everything they read into people's ticker without notice. Most people for one wouldnt even know, but the issue is the people who set they're profile private now all of a sudden have data about themselves they wanted private leaking because they added another option and set it to public. This is the only reason FB does this. FB could easily make a binary privacy setting. Private or public. They choose not too so they can leak info and thats a scam and it's what shitty people do to make money when they can't make it any way other way.
Why else would they go through all the trouble adding all these options and settings? Theres more personalization on that one page then anywhere else on FB and as you said, most people dont care. They just want everything either public or private.
I'd also like the note, this isnt some feature or design change. It's people's privacy. Privacy settings that literally get people fired or arrested because something they said wasnt private when they thought it was. That's serious and it does happen all the time.