Facebook has found itself facing some tough choices when it comes to the direction of the company, specifically revolving around user privacy. As most Netizens know, Facebook has faced harsh criticism in recent months—which may be coming to a head after having built up slowly over the years—regarding how it handles user information. Now, the company is left deciding whether it wants to revert to its old principles and go against founder Mark Zuckerberg's policy of forging ahead, privacy be damned.

Facebook public policy head Tim Sparapani said in a radio interview Tuesday that the company was working on simplifying its privacy controls because of user complaints about their complexity. "I think we are going to work on that. We are going to be providing options for users who want simplistic bands of privacy that they can choose from and I think we will see that in the next couple of weeks," he said.

Sparapani's utterances come on the heels of Facebook working to fix a privacy bug, discovered by Alert Logic earlier this week, one that allowed attackers to expose private information on a user's profile. The flaw was as simple as sending users a specially crafted link which, when clicked, would modify the user's privacy settings.

But despite these fixes and potential tweaks to Facebook's settings, users have found themselves on a very different site than the one they used even a year ago. (And for those of us who have used Facebook since 2004, it may as well be a completely different company.) What happened to Facebook being the only social network to actually protect user information and leave everything opt-in instead of opt-out? Now, Facebook is widely known for putting user information at risk, making too many settings public by default, and for not sufficiently educating users on how to keep their information private.

Luckily, there are now third-party tools that help users patch up their Facebook settings, such as the incredibly helpful bookmarklet from Reclaim Privacy that lets users see what their settings are and change them automatically. These tools shouldn't be necessary, however. Users should have everything private by default and be able to change their settings so that things are more public based on their own comfort level, not the other way around.

It's unlikely that such a user-friendly utopia will arrive anytime soon, though, especially given Zuckerberg's now-legendary disregard for privacy. According to insiders speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Zuckerberg has occasionally overruled others within Facebook who have argued that information should remain private by default. He has also historically resisted implementing some of the simpler universal controls that Facebook is currently considering. That said, Zuckerberg was the one who called last week's company meeting to discuss the current state of Facebook privacy and user trust, so it's possible that he's beginning to warm to the idea of giving users what they want.

We asked Facebook to confirm whether it had some changes in the offing. "We have heard from our users that our efforts to provide granular control have made things too complex," Facebook spokesperson Andrew Noyes told Ars via e-mail. "Of course we’re working on responding to these concerns but we don’t have anything further to announce."

The clock is ticking on the social networking giant. The complaints are building up, users are starting to defect, and the FTC may soon get involved. Facebook can't afford not to make changes.