The author assumes that the complexity of Facebook's privacy settings are due to a lack of attention to good design. However, the rest of Facebook doesn't really suffer from this problem nearly as much. Which is more likely: Facebook happened to design this one thing poorly, or they explicitly opted for a poor design in this one particular case? To answer that, follow the money. Why would they want to over-complicate the UI which gives the users the keys to lock down the data Facebook is able to share with 3rd parties?